SINGAPORE:

A new cancer test kit will now detect warning signs of the disease years before the first physical symptoms appear, researchers said on October 17. The kit, developed in Singapore, detects the warning signs by detecting minute changes in a patient’s DNA.

The early alert test is the joint project of the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and Hitachi. The kit works by looking at minute changes in chemical letters, A T and G that make up DNA, researchers told The Straits Times. In some cancers, C, which refers to the chemical cytosine, undergoes a chemical change that alters its molecular structure. When cytosine undergoes the change, methylation, the controller genes, lose the ability to produce the correct proteins to prevent tumours, they said.

“Think of it as shutting down your body’s innate surveillance system,” lead researcher Masafumi Inoue said. It is not only one gene, but several genes, which are silenced when this change occurs.” Gastric cancer, for one, is heavily correlated with DNA methylation, he said. The molecular changes happen before any physical symptoms appear.

Stem cells without killing embryo

NEW YORK:

Scientists have discovered methods of deriving stem cells that do not destroy the embryo. The two new techniques by Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Rudolf Jaenisch and team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are preliminary, and tests have focused on mice, reports the online edition of Nature. The technique developed by Lanza and team is not only a first in biological research, it is a method that would allow an embryo to implant and develop into a healthy foetus — even after viable stem cells are extracted, says another report that appeared on newsday.com. The researchers at MIT have obtained viable stem cells by creating cloned mouse embryos that are inherently incapable of implanting and developing. — HNS

New tissue in mins

LONDON:

British scientists claim they can grow new tissue in minutes, a development they say may one day allow doctors to make tissue implants at the bedside. Currently, scientists take between one and 12 weeks to make tissues to be used for operations such as skin grafts by building a scaffold of cells that grow in the lab, reports the online edition of BBC News.

Professor Robert Brown and colleagues at University College, London, experimented on making a tissue called collagen, which acts as a structural support for skin, bones and tendons. Sucking out the water using a technique called plastic compression meant they could make the collagen in just over half an hour. The tissue was not only made much faster than that made in the conventional tissue engineering way, it also appeared to be stronger, more like real collagen, the report said. — HNS