Tag: cells
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Targeted cancer drugs can distinguish between healthy and diseased cells
Drug treatment for many diseases often balances the need for high enough drug levels to give a therapeutic benefit against the concurrent increase in the risk of side effects. For example, toxic therapies such as chemotherapy drugs need to be administered at high doses to target and destroy highly replicating cells. However, this results in…
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Making The Brain: The Role of Mitochondria
Many people have heard the phrase “mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell”, whether as a part of their biology studies at school, or from the various memes on social media. This is said because mitochondria are structures within cells that provide over 90% of the energy needed by the body. These tiny organelles are…
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Turning invisible: lessons from cephalopod cells
Ellie Bennett looks at the way in which cephalopod cells might hold the key to turning our dreams of invisibility into a reality, albeit at the cellular level. There are few other classes of animal that conjure up such feverish images of deep-sea monsters or otherworldly aliens than that of the cephalopods. Translating from Greek…
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Book review: The Making of You by Katherina Vestre
It is often said that the nine-month long construction of a new little human is one of life’s great miracles. However, in the same breath, we are perhaps also a little guilty of taking this extraordinary feat of biology for granted. Katherina Vestre’s book The Making of You: A Journey from Cell to Human pulls…
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Researchers discovered placental stem cells that can regenerate heart after heart attack
Back in 2011, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai generated excitement in the cardiology community when they announced they had used placental stem cells to regenerate damaged hearts in pregnant mice. Now, they’ve taken that research a step further, isolating the precise population of cells that can regenerate healthy heart cells…
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Cancers produce painkillers
Cancer is often synonymous with pain and suffering. Abnormal cell growths produce multiple substances which increase the sensitivity and excitability of nociceptors (pain transmitting neurons), inducing hyperalgesia, a general increased sensitivity to pain, as well as allodynia, when a pain response is triggered by stimuli which do not normally provoke pain. However, not all types…