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In 1970, the US government chartered the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a component of the National Academies, to serve as an independent counsel on issues concerning health policy. Harvey Fineberg, former provost of Harvard University, has served at the helm of the IOM as the institute’s president since 2002. He spoke to Prashant Nair about the role of the IOM in biomedical research in the US.
Basic laboratory procedures can present physical challenges for biomedical researchers with disabilities. But a cadre of innovators has come up with technological solutions that make the laboratory bench more accessible to scientists with impaired sight or movement. Stu Hutson reports on how these adaptive research tools help people with disabilities by using everything from computer screen readers to security lasers.
The chromosomes of human embryos seem to be more unstable than previously thought. An analysis of embryos derived from in vitro fertilization reveals high rates of structural abnormalities (pages 577–583).
The development of a long-term intestinal culture system has, until recently, eluded researchers. Here the authors describe a method allowing long-term culture of both small intestine and colon that incorporates an air-liquid interface coupled with a three-dimensional matrix scaffold. The cultures show epithelial cell proliferation and multilineage differentiation to the major cell types and accurately recapitulate the Wnt- and Notch-dependent intestinal stem cell niche.
Interleukin-7 (IL-7) promotes immune responses and has been touted as a potential tool for improving immune targeting of tumors. Here Pellegrini et al. investigate the mechanisms by which IL-7 increases antitumor responses and the treatment strategies necessary to optimize its effects.
T cells must enter the brain to induce the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis. Lydia Sorokin and her colleagues identify a mechanism by which T cells migrate across the endothelial basement membrane, a key step to their passage from the blood into the brain.
Vanneste and her colleagues describe an array-based approach for scoring genome-wide DNA copy number variations and loss of heterozygosity in single cells. They show that chromosome instability patterns, reminiscent of those seen in human cancers, are also common in cleavage-stage in vitro–fertilized embryos. Such findings during early human embryogenesis could provide a basis for the low fecundity and high miscarriage rate in humanspages 490–491..
Hypoxia-triggered neovascularization occurs in many types of disease. Endothelial cells must be able to cope with hypoxic stress, which in other cell types can induce a DNA repair response and inhibit replication. Matina Economopoulou et al. now show that hypoxia induces the generation of a hallmark of the DNA repair response, phosphorylated histone H2AX, in proliferating endothelial cells and that H2AX function is required for neovascularization under hypoxic or ischemic conditions in vivopages 491–493..
In this study, Galbán and his colleagues describe a voxel-wise approach for the quantification of tumor microvasculature properties from perfusion magnetic resonance imaging data. When compared to the standard method of using region of interest analysis of changes in relative cerebral blood flow and volume, the parametric response map approach was found to be more predictive of treatment outcomes and overall survival in individuals with high-grade glioma.
Here Fan et al. describe a protein analysis platform for the sensitive, nanoscale diagnosis and investigation of clinical specimens, including monitoring the response to targeted therapeutics. The nanofluidic proteomic immunoassay can be used to quantify total and phosphorylated forms of oncoproteins in small tumor samples and has been validated in vivo in mouse tumors and in clinical specimens from blood, surgical biopsies and fine-needle aspirates.
Primary prostate cancer is genomically highly heterogeneous and is thought to derive from multiple independent clones of cancer cells. Using high-resolution genomic analyses, Bova et al. now show that, in contrast to primary tumors, metastases are monoclonal, originating from a single cancer cell. These findings call into question current views of the origins of primary prostate cancer and suggest that the genomic profile of prostate cancer metastases should inform therapeutic decisions.