One of the most surprising and fascinating facts about scientific research is that one never truly knows which directions investigations may take. Along the way that goes from gathering data, to the path that links our initial question and the answer we pursue, we find numerous, intriguing and unexpected little ramifications and hideous sideways that […]
The relation of cancer and the immune system has been traditionally regarded in terms of war; a force of courageous immune system soldiers representing, lets say, The United States of Your Body facing the evil forces of anarchy in the form of tumoral cells. Following this logic the immune system eradicates tumors (elimination phase) until […]
Biomedicine • Materials • Neurobiology • Physics • Physiology
Human brain has about 85 billion neurons. Each neuron forms thousands of chemical and electrical synapses with other neurons. To record the synaptic activity of each neuron in the brain an intracellular probe with a millivolt scale is required. Glass electrodes are widely used, but they are fragile and they have high impedance. An intracellular […]
The organism that causes flu is the influenza virus. It belongs to the family Orthomyxoviridae and they are included in Group V of the Baltimore classification, consisting in negative sense, single-stranded RNA viruses. Within this family there are three genres that are responsible for the flu: Influenza A virus, Influenza B virus and Influenza C […]
Proteins are sophisticated machines that perform most of our cellular activities. Proteins are codified in the cellular DNA and synthesized as linear chains that need to get properly folded in a 3D structure to become functional. This state is named native structure. Several perturbations can challenge the native structure of the proteins converting them into […]
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterized by an inefficiency to respond to the glucose requirements of the body, a process largely regulated by the popular hormone known as insulin. Insulin is produced and secreted in a specific type of cells in the pancreas called β-cells, which are able to detect and respond to high glucose […]
Killing cancer cells is a key point to cure cancer. Many researchers are working on developing different therapies to do just that. The one I’m going to talk about today is a very promising one: Oncolytic Virotherapy. Just the name may scare you but it’s a very clever approach to treat some tumors lacking a […]
The advances in molecular biology and the so called post-genomic era, have improved significantly the fight against many human diseases, in some cases almost leading to their eradication. However, there are still regions of our planet were people suffer from infections and other causes of mortality which are easily avoided in the most developed countries […]
Nowadays there are quite a few compounds in clinical trials to assay their potential as breast cancer treatments. Some of them are the so called “PARP inhibitors”. These inhibitors work very well in tumours that have a deficiency in DNA repair because PARP proteins are involved in that process. However, a group of researchers working […]
A study published last year in The Lancet showed that a daily dose of aspirin reduces the risk of dying from several types of cancer. According to the authors’ data, long-term daily intake reduces the probability of dying from solid tumours by more than 30%. These results are consistent with known effects of aspirin blocking […]
