Umbilical cord blood may safely preserve insulin production in children newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, according to findings from a small national pilot study .

University of Florida researchers sought to determine whether it is feasible to use a patient’s own cord blood stem cells to neutralize the body’s autoimmune attack on the pancreas and help restore the organ’s ability to make insulin, which regulates how the body uses sugar and other nutrients for energy.

“This is the first attempt at using cord blood as a potential therapy for type 1 diabetes. We hope these cells can either lessen the immune system’s attack on the pancreas or possibly introduce stem cells that can differentiate into insulin-producing cells,” said pediatric endocrinologist Dr.

Treatment with intravenous bisphosphonates — drugs used to reduce harm done to bones by cancer or cancer therapy — increases the risk of jaw or facial bone disease or infection, a large-scale comparative study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has found.

Drawing on the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database linked to Medicare insurance claims, investigators from the UTMB Center for Population Health and Health Disparities compared more than 14,000 cancer patients treated with two types of intravenous bisphosphonates (pamidronate and zoledronic acid) with nearly 27,000 cancer patients who did not receive the drugs.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have determined how a substance derived from the bark of the South American lapacho tree kills certain kinds of cancer cells, findings that also suggest a novel treatment for the most common type of lung cancer.

The compound, called beta-lapachone, has shown promising anti-cancer properties and is currently being used in a clinical trial to examine its effectiveness against pancreatic cancer in humans. Until now, however, researchers didn’t know the mechanism of how the compound killed cancer cells.

Constipated? In the early 19th century, the apothecary would most likely have prescribed you calomel, or mercurous chloride, as a purgative, regardless of its toxicity. Because it worked. It was also useful as an insecticide.

This was the sort of thing being concocted at the Apothecaries’ Hall in Blackfriars, then a major center for drug manufacturing in London, says Anna Simmons, a historian of science at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

In the first scientific publication from The Genographic Project, a five-year effort to understand the human journey, researchers report their experience of genotyping human mitochondrial DNA during the first 18 months of the project.

Writing in PLoS Genetics, Doron Behar and colleagues describe the procedures used to generate, manage and analyze the genetic data from 78,590 public participants. They also provide the first anthropological insights in this unprecedented effort to map humanity’s genetic journey through the ages.

The first U.S. study to transplant a potent form of purified adult stem cells into the heart muscle of patients with severe angina provided evidence that the procedure is safe and produced a reduction in angina pain as well as improved functioning in patients' daily lives, reports the lead researcher at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Within three to six weeks after the severe angina patients were injected with their own stem cells, many who used to experience pain just from walking to the refrigerator, now only had pain when they climbed two flights of stairs.