Open Source Pharma

Liberia’s Ebola Routine: Wear Your Temperature On Your Lapel

After 10 days in Liberia, NPR producer Nicole Beemsterboer has just landed in London. “You don’t realize how much has been hanging over your head until you’re out,” she says.

She’s talking about Ebola, the virus raging in Liberia as well as Sierra Leone and Guinea. “It was silent and invisible,” she says. “So you’re always on edge, always careful.”

How did you protect yourself?

I got used to not touching anyone, no handshakes. And there are buckets of chlorine solution everywhere — outside every office building, police station, government office, hotel, store. Everywhere. I washed my hands dozens of times a day, and was careful never to touch my face.

At government buildings, officials watch you wash your hands and then take your temperature with an ear-gun thermometer. They write your temperature on a piece of paper and actually staple it to your lapel so it’s visible to everyone inside. You can’t get in the building if you have a temperature, and it sends a message: We’re being vigilant; you need to be vigilant, too. Hold yourself and others accountable.

And you were careful right down to the soles of your boots?

We were concerned that if anything was contaminated, it was the bottom of our boots, so we were constantly rinsing them in the chlorine solution.

I don’t know that we started a trend, but on the last day we were there, our hotel added a shoe wash — a box with a big foam pad inside, soaked in chlorine so you didn’t have to soak your shoes but were getting enough chlorine on [the soles] to decontaminate them. We started seeing this more and more, at Redemption Hospital and other places around the city.

Does the chlorine cause any problems?

Only minor ones, and under the threat of Ebola, they didn’t bother me at all. All my clothes are spattered with bleach. I would dry my hands on my pants; my pants have bleach stains all over them. And it did smell like a pool everywhere you went.

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New type of cell movement discovered

In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania and National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, scientists used an innovative technique to study how cells move in a three-dimensional matrix, similar to the structure of certain tissues, such as the skin. They discovered an entirely new type of cell movement whereby the nucleus helps propel cells through the matrix like a piston in an engine, generating pressure that thrusts the cell’s plasma membrane forward.

"Our work elucidated a highly intriguing question: how cells move when they are in the complex and physiologically relevant environment of a 3-D extracellular matrix," said Hyun (Michel) Koo, a professor in the Department of Orthodontics at Penn’s School of Dental Medicine. "We discovered that the nucleus can act as a piston that physically compartmentalizes the cell cytoplasm and increases the hydrostatic pressure driving the cell motility within a 3-D matrix."

R. J. Petrie, H. Koo, K. M. Yamada. Generation of compartmentalized pressure by a nuclear piston governs cell motility in a 3D matrix. Science, 2014; 345 (6200): 1062 DOI: 10.1126/science.1256965

When A Home Poses Health Risks, The Floor May Be The Culprit

Most of us overlook the ground beneath our feet. But when Gayatri Datar, 28, looks at the floor, she sees an opportunity to improve public health.

A research trip to Rwanda last year, when she was a Stanford University M.B.A. student, transformed Datar’s perspective. “I kept seeing dirt floors,” she recalls.For those who had to live and sleep on them, “it was clearly an unsanitary environment. Dust is kicked up in the dry season. In the rainy season, there are puddles. It’s a breeding ground for mosquitoes. It’s impossible to clean a dirt floor because it’s just dirt.”

Indeed, diarrhea, a leading killer of children in the developing world, spreads more easily in homes with dirt floors. So do respiratory and parasitic diseases. Because cleaning the floors is so difficult, fecal matter brought in on shoes or from dirty water spilled indoors tends to stay put, and children are especially likely to ingest it.

A 2007 World Bank study of a Mexican government program to replace dirt floors with cement found that doing so “significantly improves the health of young children.” Among the study’s findings: “A complete substitution of dirt floors by cement floors in a house leads to a 78 percent reduction in parasitic infestations, a 49 percent reduction in diarrhea, an 81 percent reduction in anemia and a 36 to 96 percent improvement in cognitive development.” Beyond this, adults reported “increased satisfaction with … their quality of life.”

Datar became preoccupied with figuring out a way to provide more healthful floors for the roughly 80 percent of Rwanda’s 11.5 million population living in homes built directly on the ground. Back in California, she teamed up with other students to investigate the possibilities. Concrete, the most common replacement for dirt floors, is unaffordable for most Rwandans, costing nearly as much as many earn in an entire year.

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Thomas Lee on the power of basic research (and Janet Napolitano’s message at the OpenSDx Summit):

As Napolitano correctly noted, the private sector has pretty much outsourced basic research, which can be time consuming, expensive and unprofitable, to public universities. Yet taxpayer support for public universities has fallen dramatically over the past 20 years.

Mycoplasma | wellcome images

The secrets of cell development

Amazingly, all the cells in our body have exactly the same DNA and yet still manage to be completely different and carry out different jobs, from pumping our hearts to fighting off infections!

We have epigenetic marks to thank for this. Epigenetic marks (special molecules that attach at certain areas of the DNA) control how a DNA sequence is read and provide a mechanism for cell memory, without affecting the DNA sequence itself. These marks allow cells to interpret the uniform genetic information in different ways, by switching different genes on or off. The marks also help cells to remember which genes should be on and off and they can also pass this information onto other cells during cell division.

Without these epigenetic mechanisms cells would lose their identity, and to some extent that is what happens in diseases like cancer.

BBSRC-funded Professor Wolf Reik and Dr Fatima Santos, from the University Of Cambridge and The Babraham Institute, are studying stem cells, like the cells above, to find out more about epigenetic information: research which is providing us with new approaches to improve the potential of stem cells for regenerative medicine.

Image credits: Dr Fatima Santos

Read more: http://www.epigenesys.eu/en/

Common Bacteria Shrink Solid Tumors

Scientists have found that the spores produced by bacteria commonly found in the environment can shrink solid tumors, as long as they are directly injected into the tumor. This treatment strategy is important in part because it could do a better job than existing therapies of destroying cancerous tissue while leaving nearby healthy tissue intact. Nicholas Roberts and colleagues show in dogs with naturally occurring cancer and in one human patient that injections of a genetically modified strain of the bacteria Clostridium novyi can shrink solid tumors. Further studies are needed to fine-tune what tumor types are susceptible to this form of therapy, what dose should be used, and what kinds of other medicines can best be combined with the bacteria.

Read more about this research from the 13 August issue of Science Translational Medicine here.

[Video © Science/AAAS]

F.D.A. Allows First Use of a Novel Cancer Drug

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first of an eagerly awaited new class of cancer drugs that unleashes the body’s immune system to fight tumors.

The drug, which Merck will sell under the name Keytruda, was approved for patients with advanced melanoma who have exhausted other therapies.

Scientists go fishing for proteins

Professor Neil Hunter FRS and Dr Matt Johnson, together with a BBSRC-funded team from the University of Sheffield have made a breakthrough in our understanding of how plants turn sunlight into food, by mapping the organisation of a crucial protein complex known as cytochrome b6f. This has been done in the photosynthetic membrane of the plant cell chloroplast.

The team have developed a new imaging technique known as affinity mapping atomic force microscopy to pinpoint the location of cytochrome b6f relative to the chlorophyll-protein complex photosystem II. Locating a protein in a membrane is ordinarily a bit tricky, as they all often look quite similar. But Matt and his team have used this novel technique that involves attaching a molecule known as plastocyanin (blue) to the AFM tip (grey) and using this as ‘bait’ to ‘fish’ for the cytochrome b6f(fuschia), to which it binds with near 100% accuracy. This allows the topographic features of the membrane that are revealed in AFM image to be assigned to particular proteins based on whether they bind to the molecular bait.

Understanding the organisation of the molecular machinery of photosynthesis takes us a step closer to unravelling nature’s staggeringly successful blueprint for solar energy capture and conversion. Such fundamental research into photosynthesis is a first step towards harnessing the power of the sun to meet future energy needs.

This new technique could be used to locate other proteins in any biological membrane including in, plants, bacteria, and even humans, information that could be crucial to understanding how defective proteins can cause disease.

Image credit: University of Sheffield

Read more: 

http://www.plantcell.org/content/early/2014/07/28/tpc.114.130161.full.pdf+html