Understanding diseases to combat them better Fighting cancer, HIV and malaria requires understanding these devastating diseases’ attack strategies as well as the body’s subtle defence mechanisms. Research is making giant strides on both fronts. Pauses are more frequent in Alzheimer patients’ speech patterns By comparing the spontaneous speech of Alzheimer’s sufferers with that of healthy elderly subjects, psycholinguists have shown that silent pauses—as opposed to filled pauses (such as ‘er...’), which indicate difficulty in speech planning—are more frequent in Alzheimer patients. The study, one of the first to focus on the temporal organization of speech in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, validates the hypothesis Researchers have designed a magnetic that certain rhythmic characteristics of speech may constitute significant premorbid nanocarrier guided by a magnet, with a evidence. membrane that can be fluidified by local Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics March 2011 heating, allowing controlled delivery of a drug into the heart of a tumor. As a result, twice as much active ingredient can be released without Fractals in our blood raising the body temperature. -------------------------------------------- Fibrin fibers, the main component of blood clots, have a fractal internal structure. This finding was made possible by the development of a new optical spectrometry method that can be used to describe the size and density of these fibers, and thus observe their internal geometry. The fractal structure of fibrin accounts for its ability to break down rapidly after the repair of injured tissue. If poorly regulated, this property can lead to thrombosis and embolisms. How HIV-1 outsmarts our immune defences ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Biologists have discovered a cellular factor that allows the VIH-1 virus to get past the body’s defences. Everything hinges on the dendritic cells, the body’s sentinels, which The microdroplet technique will help oncologists to better trigger an immune response when they detect the presence of pathogens. In the case predict the development of the disease. of HIV-1, the cells have to allow the intruder to infect them and present its antigens to the cells involved in the specific immune response. The snag is that the infection does not Scientists have developed a method for take place properly, which weakens the response. The reason for this is the absence of a detecting cancer by testing blood or urine. protein called Vpx, which is specific to HIV-2, a less pathogenic virus. This makes it possible to detect The researchers isolated all the dendritic cell proteins that interact with Vpx and identified tiny traces of tumor DNA present protein SAMHD1, which inhibits the replication of the virus. They showed that this protein reduces the ability of HIV-1 to infect the dendritic cells. This discovery could eventually in biological fluids. The technique lead to new vaccines. is being tested as part of a clinical study for therapeutic care and the detection of Nature May 2011 recurrence. -------------------------------------------- 14 A year at CNRS 2011
ra2011
To see the actual publication please follow the link above