Newest Posts
A NOVEL IMMUNOTHERAPY FOR PREVENTING POST-STROKE DEMENTIA
Recent work by the Buckwalter Lab at Stanford University indicates that eliminating B cells following stroke may protect patients from later developing vascular dementia.
DESIGNING DRUGS
Kinase inhibitors are one of the most common types of prescription drugs, but developing them is difficult and expensive. Using a new method, kinase inhibitors can be designed quickly and easily just by knowing the protein sequence!
READING BEWEEN THE LINES
When people take multiple prescription drugs at the same time, dangerous drug-drug interactions can occur. Scientists are working to predict drug-drug interactions before they happen in people – by teaching computers how to read!
EXOSOMES: IT'S NOT THE SIZE OF THE PACKAGE THAT MATTERS, BUT WHAT A CELL CAN DO WITH IT
Scientists have known for decades that cells readily communicate with each other. To send signals close by, a communicative cell can nestle up to a neighbor that has the lock into which its key fits (yes that is a euphemism - a euphemism for ligand-receptor binding. To talk to other cells they aren’t directly touching, cells can release substances such as hormones). These substances enter the circulatory system and eventually are sensed by other groups of cells that can respond to that specific signal. We pretty much thought those were the only two broad ways that cells could talk to each other by directly touching or by releasing signaling molecules. However, in the 80s, a group of scientists first described tiny spheres, or vesicles, inside cells in a laboratory[1]. They noticed that these vesicles were eventually expelled into the cell…