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Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts

Monday, January 25, 2016

Rotation speed, bad news for Red Planet pioneers



A team of scientists from Holland, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK’s) University of Manchester have revealed the importance of a circadian body clock that matches the rotational speed of the earth in a new study, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to the Media Relations Officer, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Mr. Mike Addelman, these group of scientists studied animals in which variation in a single gene dramatically speeds up the natural circadian cycle from 24 to 20 hours.

“It is the first study to demonstrate of the value of having an internal body clock which beats in tune with the speed of the earth’s rotation,” he said.

The researchers, Addelman said, released animals with 24 hour or 20 hour clocks into outdoor pens, with free access to food, and studied how the proportion of animals with fast clocks changed in the population over a period of 14 months.

This, he said, allowed the team to study the impact of clock-speed in context of the “real-world” rather than indoors.

Mice with fast-running clock, experts said, gradually become less common with successive generations, so that by the end of the study, the population was dominated by animals with “normal” 24h clocks.

The research has potentially important implications for human health:  clock-disruption associated with abnormal work and lighting conditions, such as night shift work leads to health problems, such as increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The scientists pointed out that these studies now extended to the potential implications of space travel in the future, citing for instance, that the Martian day is 37 minutes longer than that on earth.

Professor Andrew Loudon, from The University of Manchester said the rotation speed of Mars may be within the limits of some people’s internal clock, but people with short running clocks, such as extreme morning types, are likely to face serious intractable long-term problems, and would perhaps be excluded from any plans National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has to send humans to Mars.

“The prospect of settling on Mars is a somewhat distant prospect. But if we ever do get to the Red Planet, I suspect we will be faced with body clock problems; those people with abnormally slow body clocks would be best suited to living there,” Prof. Loudon said.

Correctly, he pointed out that ticking body clock is essential for normal survival in the wild, and this has to be in phase with the rotation speed of the earth.

“Animals with clocks that do not run in synchrony with earth are selected against. Thus, the body clock has evolved as an essential survival component for life on earth,” he explained.

 Isaac Oyimah/GEE

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Friday, November 8, 2013

Cancer treatment: Experts discover how oxygen levels in tumours affect response

NaijaAgroNet:
Experts at the United Kingdom-based Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC), a partnership project founded by The University of Manchester, have revealed the disclosure that the genetic make-up of a patient’s tumour could be used to personalise their treatment, reports NaijaAgroNet.

This, NaijaAgroNet gathered would help to decide whether cancer patients would benefit from receiving additional drugs as part of their radiotherapy programme, according to a recent study involving scientists from MCRC.
Experts said tumours with lower levels of oxygen, otherwise known as hypoxia often respond less well to radiation therapy.

“There are several agents that can be given to patients before radiotherapy to reduce hypoxia, but these are not given as standard. Being able to measure how well-oxygenated an individual’s tumour is would give doctors a valuable way of identifying which patients might benefit from treatment with hypoxia reducing agents before radiotherapy,” MCRC scientists explained.

They further said, hypoxia has previously been investigated by looking at the expression of certain genes, and Manchester researchers have come up with a genetic profile for tumours that should indicate the overall level of oxygenation.

NaijaAgroNet reports that researchers at MCRC carried out the study in patients diagnosed with cancer of the bladder and larynx, stressing these patients subsequently underwent either standard radiotherapy or radiotherapy with the addition of two agents which in combination are known to increase oxygenation: nicotinamide and carbogen.

The team tested patients’ tumour samples for 26 genes in order to classify them as more or less hypoxic, and then analysed whether this hypoxia score related to the results of treatment.

Leader of the team, Prof. Catharine West of The University’s Institute of Cancer Sciences, said “Our goal is to find ways of predicting how patients will respond to different treatments.

“Future cancer treatments will be personalised so that patients get the best therapy for their tumour,” she said, pointing out that personalising therapy will not only increase the number of people surviving cancer but also decrease side-effects, as patients would be spared from having treatments that are unlikely to work in their tumour.

Prof. West emphasised that they will now test how the hypoxia score works in the clinic in a trial starting in December in patients with head and neck cancer.

“I have studied ways of measuring hypoxia in tumours for many years so this is a very exciting finding that could help us optimise how we use radiotherapy to get the best outcome for patients,” she declared.


Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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Pix: Prof. Cath West and Pro. Davies