Children,
teens, adults, whatever your ages are, you are still prone to diseases.
Diseases are known as the cause of death as it attacks every individual. They develop
and give more danger to each life. Because of this, new ill trends drive nation
to modernization through discovering ways and creating more efficient
technologies which can stop the diseases’ growth and development.
Here are some 2014 trends:
Cancer
Immunotherapy
“The new frontier in cancer
treatment is getting a person’s own immune system to eliminate tumors, rather
than target- ing the cancer cells with chemotherapy. In contrast to
conventional cancer treatments, immunotherapies can lead to long-lasting
clinical responses.” - Lawrence
Fong, MD, associate professor of medicine
Conventional chemotherapy for cancer leaves much to be
desired.
Currently available compounds kill normal cells as well
as cancer cells, leading to serious side effects. The immune system, meanwhile,
is remarkably effective at combatting bacterial and viral invaders while
sparing normal cells, but the goal of coaxing immune cells to target cancer has
eluded researchers for decades.
But the
field has turned a corner over the past several years, as researchers have
identified receptors expressed on immune system cells, such as CTLA4
and PD-1 that put the brakes on the immune response. In recent clinical trials
of antibodies that block these receptors, doctors have seen unprecedented
responses in metastatic melanoma and lung cancer, both of which are almost
always fatal with conventional treatments.
Because
the immune system has a “memory,” these responses have proven far more durable
than those to targeted cancer drugs: Some patients treated at UCSF with
anti-CTLA4 therapy for late-stage metastatic prostate cancer are still living
more than six years later.
Genome Editing
“A system known as CRISPRs gives us
unprecedented ability to reach in and surgically alter and manipulate the
genome. Their impact on basic discovery and on biotechnology and medicine will
be revolutionary.”
- Wendell Lim,
PhD, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology and Howard Hughes
Medicine Institute investigator.
The 1998 discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) provided
scientists with a
But RNAi can be imprecise, causing unintended
“off-target” silencing of genes, and the technique can be time-consuming and
cumbersome to employ in experiments. Other methods, such as zinc-finger
proteins, have similar limitations.
To the rescue come Clustered Regularly
Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a gene-editing system that could
revolutionize everything from disease treatment to plant biology. The technique involves programming an RNA guide molecule to
target a section of defective DNA and replace it with “good” DNA.
CRISPRs are simple and inexpensive to use, and can
precisely and reversibly suppress the expression of multiple target genes in
human cells with 99.9 percent efficiency. Lim, Jonathan Weissman, PhD, and
their colleagues in UCSF’s Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology
are at the forefront of CRISPR research.
The Human Microbiome
“Microbiome research is
rapidly identifying relationships between the bacterial ecosystem in the human
gut and an ever-expanding range of diseases. This field of research will prove
transformative in the development of novel microbiome-based therapies to treat
or prevent respiratory, gastrointestinal and even neurological disorders."
— Susan Lynch,
PhD, associate professor of medicine
Though scientists have long known that bacteria reside in
and on our bodies, it is only over the past few years that research has
unveiled the staggering scale of these populations and their crucial importance
to our health.
There are
as many as 1,000 bacterial species known to live in the human gut alone, and
all told, these organisms – collectively known as the microbiome – outnumber
our own cells by a factor of 10 and account for 1 to 3 percent of our total
body mass.
Disturbances in these microbial communities have now been
associated with a range of serious chronic diseases, such as inflammatory bowel
disease, allergies, obesity, cancer, and even psychiatric and neurological
disorders.
The emergence of new therapies targeting the microbiome
is one of the most exciting frontiers in medicine.
Cell Therapy
“We now have the technology to
be able to generate stem cells from a sample of a patient’s skin, correct the
genetic mutation in those cells and return the ‘gene-corrected’ cells back to
the patient for therapy. These cells have the advan- tage of containing the
patient’s own genetic code, so they escape rejection by the body’s immune
system.”
— David
Rowitch, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics and neurological surgery
For years, investigators have worked to
enable gene therapy to correct
The
discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, by Nobel laureate
Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, and his colleagues in 2006 has brought new hope to
the field by making a cell-based approach to gene therapy possible.
Researchers
can now use a patient’s skin cells to create iPS cells that then can be induced
to differentiate into the specialized cell types that make up the various
organs of the body. Faulty genes can be corrected in these differentiated
cells, which can then be placed directly into affected organs.
Modernization
really wakes people up in realities, that we can undergone circumstances
through coming up with new ideas, discoveries, and inventions. That we don’t
need to suffer and feel the pain caused by these illnesses because we are now
in modern days and life. That all we need is to cooperate, support and believe.
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