Molecule-sized drills do the damage they are designed to do. That’s bad news for disease. Scientists at Rice University, Biola University and the Texas A&M Health Science Center have further validation that their molecular motors, light-activated rotors that spin up to 3 million times per second, can target diseased cells and kill them in minutes.   The team led by Biola molecular biochemist Richard Gunasekera and Rice chemist James Tour showed their motors are highly effective at destroying cells...

More than 2.5 million people in the United States alone experience a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, each year. Some of these people are plagued by a seemingly unrelated cascade of health issues for years after their head injury, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, memory issues, and sleep disturbances.   A collaborative team, led by Dr. Randall Urban, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston’s Chief Research Officer and Professor of Endocrinology, has spent the past 20...

The Rice University team led by Antonios Mikos says otherwise with its development of a groovy method to seed sophisticated, 3D-printed tissue-engineering scaffolds with living cells to help heal injuries.   The researchers are literally carving grooves into plastic threads used to build the scaffolds. The grooves are then seeded with cells or other bioactive agents that encourage the growth of new tissue.   The strategy protects cells from the heat and shear stresses that would likely...

A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that circulating tumor cells (CTCs), a form of liquid biopsy, was independently associated with melanoma relapse, suggesting CTC assessment may be useful in identifying patients at risk for relapse who could benefit from more aggressive therapy following primary treatment.   Although CTCs can be detected in melanoma patients, there is limited data regarding their significance in stage III (node-positive) disease. This prospective study was based on earlier research that found...

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor. Their findings identify macrophages that express high levels of CD73, a surface enzyme that’s a vital piece of an immunosuppressive molecular pathway. The strong presence of the CD73 macrophages was unique to glioblastoma among five tumor...

Hydrogels for healing, synthesized from the molecules up by Rice University bioengineers, are a few steps closer to the clinic. Rice researchers and collaborators at Texas Heart Institute (THI) have established a baseline set of injectable hydrogels that promise to help heal wounds, deliver drugs, and treat cancer. Critically, they’ve analyzed how the chemically distinct hydrogels provoke the body’s inflammatory response — or not.   Hydrogels developed at Rice are designed to be injectable and create a...

A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center demonstrated a potential new approach to treating two of the most common subtypes of lymphoma through manipulation of molecular programs controlled by the cAMP-response element-binding protein (CREBBP). Mutations of CREBBP are frequently found in follicular lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL) and allow malignant cells to hide from the immune system.   Co-lead investigators, Michael Green, Ph.D., assistant professor of Lymphoma & Myeloma at MD Anderson and Ari Melnick, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medical...

A one-year follow-up study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed a majority of patients with mantle cell lymphoma resistant to prior therapies may benefit from treatment with CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.   The multi-center, Phase II study reported that 93% of patients responded to the CAR T-cell therapy, with 67% achieving a complete response. Forty-three percent of the first 28 patients treated are still in remission over...

A study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that treatment combining lower doses of chemotherapy with the monoclonal antibody inotuzumab ozogamicin (INO), with or without the drug blinatumomab, is safe and effective in patients over 60 years of age who were newly diagnosed with a high-risk form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) known as Philadelphia chromosome-negative ALL.   “This study demonstrated that reduced-intensity chemotherapy, when combined with INO, resulted in...

A new study by researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston uncovered new information on why the Ebola virus can exert such catastrophic effects on the infected person. They’ve described for the first time how the virus disables T cells, an important line of immune defense, thus rendering the infected person less able to combat the infection. Ebola virus disease is one of the most devastating infectious diseases known to exist, with previous outbreaks...