A co-author of the study, Christopher Walsh, told Scientific American:

We're showing, on the one hand, that autism seems to have a large genetic component. But, the genes that are involved are actually those that are involved in responding to the environment and learning.

Often, autistic children have problems with the genes that help them learn by forming synapses between neurons in the brain. Either the genes are deleted or dormant.

The Scientific American article continues:

Walsh says the team believes these deletions—which in most cases found here only remove some, but not all, of the DNA that makes up a gene—may mean that the genes can regain some of their normal function. In fact, some of these genes may just be switched off. "This presents the possibility that in some kids we could get the gene going again without necessarily having to put it back in the brain," he says . . . Walsh notes that many children diagnosed with autism tend to show vast improvement when they are placed in environments that allow them to practice learning repetitively. He says that these activities essentially train the neurons to make up for their lost function. "Our work reinforces the importance of early intervention and behavioral therapy," he says. "The more we understand about genetics the more we understand how important the environment is."

This is one of the first studies to offer genetic evidence for the idea that children with autism can actually reformat their brains if placed in the right environment. There has been anecdotal evidence that autistic people can benefit from specialized learning environments, but it was never clear what the genetic basis for these recoveries might be.

Autism Genes that Control Early Learning [via Scientific American]

If you've had cancer, or been diagnosed with cancer, you are eligible to participate. Says the call for volunteers:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University are seeking volunteers with a current or past diagnosis of cancer who have some anxiety or are feeling down about their cancer to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning brought about by the entheogen psilocybin, a psychoactive substance found in mushrooms used as a sacrament in some cultures, given in a comfortable, supportive setting. Questionnaires and interviews will be used to assess the effects of the substance on consciousness, mood, and behavior.

Volunteers enrolled in the study will receive careful preparation and 2 sessions in which they will receive psilocybin. Structured guidance will be provided during the session and afterwards to facilitate integration of the experiences. The study complies with FDA regulations.

Volunteer must be between the ages of 21 and 70, have no personal history of severe psychiatric illness, or recent history of alcoholism or drug abuse, have someone willing to pick them up and drive them home at the end of the two psilocybin sessions (around 5:00 PM).

I love science.

If you want to find out more about study, or are interested in volunteering, visit the call for volunteers website.

From the article on We Make Money Not Art:

Revital's scenario imagine that, in the future, a patient suffering from kidney failure would give a blood sample to lab scientists who then isolate in the genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex), extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep's genome with the DNA from the patients' genome.

This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. After cell division in the egg is initiated, the egg is implanted into a surrogate ewe which will eventually give birth to a transgenic lamb.

During the day, the dialysis sheep roams in the donor patient's back garden, grazes to cleanse its kidneys, and drinks water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.

At night, the sheep is placed at the patient's bedside. The transgenic sheep's kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient's fistula (a surgically enlarged vein). During the night, waste products from the patient's blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep's kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. The day after, the sheep urinates the toxins.

Another of "Life Support"'s projects aims to use greyhounds as artificial lungs for patients who require ventilators to breathe. The device works by strapping a bellows to a retired racing dog (one that would be euthanized anyway) and having it chase a bunny while on a treadmill. As the dog runs, it's increased lung movements pump the bellows, providing air for a human patient.

This sounds cute and all, but how practical is it, really? Greyhounds can't run non-stop, 24 hours a day. What happens when the dog tires out, or needs a little kibble snack? And as for the sheep thing, do you really think PETA is going to let you jam needles into their heads, even if they're transgenic?

Source: Revital Cohen, via We Make Money Not Art via MedGadget

Complete with a pistol that sprays skin-healing stem cells (pictured), a tissue-printer that can print human organs, and of course the very famous — and controversial — "pixie dust" derived from pig bladders for regenerating limbs, the newly created Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine will throw $250 million at new therapies to help patch up of fixing soldiers maimed in battle in Iraq. It's always possible that some of the techs may not work out but with a quarter billion dollars of backing, it's probably just a mater of time until you see "Skin Guns" right next to the Band Aids in your local drugstore aisle. (from: PopSci)

Previous work with antibodies-as-cancer-killing-smart-missiles has involved attaching strong, nasty chemotherapy drugs to the antibodies. That's a good option, but even better would be to not have harsh chemicals circulating in your blood stream in the first place. Using nanotubes and infrared light is a good, pretty safe alternative because IR radiation doesn't damage living tissue. The only drawback is the tumors will need to be less than 1.5 inches deep in the body, about the limit for the radiation's effectiveness.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center

Evidently this system is already in practice in Spain, and the organ-harvesting ambulances are only dispatched when a known volunteer donor is in a life-threatening situation, and now a group of NYC doctors led by surgeon Lewis Goldfrank of Bellevue Hospital Center at New York University want to replicate the process. Still, it's not hard to picture the harvesting paramedics looking over the regular EMTs saying "oh man, that looks bad. Don't think he's going to make it..." or carting someone off to be 'redistributed,' only to have the patient protest, "I'm not dead yet," Monty Python-style:

Normally, transplant and organ preservation specialists don't get involved until after a patient has been declared dead. "Declaring someone dead out in the field, when the person is either not decapitated or decomposed ... is a critical decision," said Michael Grodin, a specialist in health law and bio ethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

"I think it is a bad idea, a counterproductive one," he said. "The public will see it as an ambulance floating around in the city ready to take your body."

The project's goal is to send an ambulance to the scene of an accident and for the paramedics to do what they can to save the victim's life.

But without necessarily telling these paramedics, project administrators will also order a special ambulance in charge of collecting fresh human organs to the accident site. Its personnel will intervene only if the patient dies.

Source: PhysOrg

Sometimes here at io9, we have to stretch a little to fit cool sci-fi buzzwords like "cyborg" or "post-apocalypse" into our science headlines. But sometimes the scientists do it for us. A team of scientists recently grafted vascular smooth muscle cells and epithelial umbilical cells onto a scaffold of poly-urethane, forming flexible artificial veins and arteries. They referred to this as "cyborg engineering." Once they started pumping blood through them, they found the cyborg veins worked better under vascular pressure. They hope to use them in coronary bypass surgeries, in which a vein from another part of the body is used to shunt a vein around a blockage.

Artificial veins are just a first step toward engineering artifical organs. Not only would this give us a near limitless supply of replacement organs (no more dramatic "tricking hospital administrators into allowing a patient onto the donor waiting list" scenes on House), but we could design the organs to be more healthy and perfect than real ones. You could celebrate your 50th birthday with a batch of fresh, young organs. Your cyborg grandpa might live to be 200. Image by: Science Daily.

'Cyborg Engineering' Enables Coronary Bypass Grafting Using Artificial Veins And Arteries. [Science Daily]

The bot is remote-controlled by magnetic field, just like the ones in the bloodstream. To move it up and down through your insides, your doctor will have a hand-held magnetic device about the size of a chocolate bar. Where ever s/he waves the device, the bot follows. The new gadget will be used for studying the insides of the stomach and esophagus mainly, which are usually hard because a device that's swallowed only spends few seconds in those parts of the body. Once in the stomach, it tends to sink to the bottom of the stomach, making imaging tough.

With magnetic control, doctors will be able to keep the camera-bot floating in the esophagus, stomach, or whatever part of the GI tract they want to study. It'll probably feel really strange having a robot wiggling through your esophagus, but it could go a long way towards treating cancers in the stomach and esophagus, not to mention that pesky, heartburn-inducing acid reflux disease.

Source: Eurekalert!

Now who wouldn't want an ambulance dispatch when they have a heart attack, but automatically summoning the authorities whenever your vitals go haywire? There are plenty of reasons that could happen, and most of them are pretty personal. There's also a proposal on the table to have your pill dispenser automatically alert the hospital when you haven't been taking your meds...

This sounds like privacy clusterf—k waiting to happen, but to their credit the folks at OfCom at least appear aware of the issues:

If the "in-body network" recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

However, Ofcom also gave warning in its report, Tomorrow's Wireless World, that the impact of such technology on personal privacy would require more debate.

That 'more debate' is definitely going to need some clarification. Still, in principle it's hard to deny the awesomeness of getting Bluetooth installed in your body.

Oh, and before Dennis Quaid goes and loses it completely, we'd better console him — despite their uber-coolness, the sensors cannot replace you, Dennis. Only you have the power, as the pilot of your miniature vehicle designed for intrabody-exploration, to push a button and rearrange Martin Short or indeed any one else's face to look like The Cowboy's (Pictured).

Source: The Times Online via LiveScience

Image: Firstshowing.net

Together with the recent development of an automatic anesthesia machine, the automated robot surgeon presents an eerie prospect for the operating room of tomorrow: it may be completely uninhabited by people except you, the patient. Perhaps a technician will look on from behind a two-way mirror; perhaps not.

There's a long way to go before that happens. For example, robots will have to learn to adapt to unforeseen complications during surgery. But what would you think if the OR at your local hospital looked more like an assembly line at General Motors and less like a place where people are healed? Would you trust a robot to cut you apart then sew you back up, good as new?

Source: PhysOrg

Image: Medgadget

Led by neuroscientist Bill Deakin of the University of Manchester in the UK, researchers gave 33 healthy men ketamine intravenously and monitored its effects in brain scans once per minute. Activity in the orbitfrontal cortex, which is thought to be responsible for feelings of dread and anxiety, quickly shut down.

As the researchers say, this opens the doors for much better trips — I mean moods, much better MOODS — for people suffering from depression who don't respond to other drugs, like Prozac. It also works within 24 hours, whereas 'zac can take a month.

Source: Reuters

Image: Technology Review

McGill anesthesiologist Thomas M. Hemmerling, who helped develop McSleepy, says:

We have been working on closed-loop systems, where drugs are administered, their effects continuously monitored, and the doses are adjusted accordingly, for the last five years. Think of "McSleepy" as a sort of humanoid anesthesiologist that thinks like an anesthesiologist, analyses biological information and constantly adapts its own behavior, even recognizing monitoring malfunction.

I still can't decide if I'd feel safer or less safe with a robot monitoring my anesthesia. At least it wouldn't fall prey to human error — only to operating system crashes.

McGill News via The Biotech Weblog

Turns out Alan Spievak worked in regenerative medicine, and was familiar with Stephen Badylak's work at the University of Pittsburgh. Toiling in the lab, Badylak figured out that extra cellular matrix from a pig bladder (the stuff leftover when bladder cells are washed away), is chock full of biochemical signals that prevent scarring from stunting cells' regenerative tendencies. But he'd never used it on people, so when Spievak rubbed the powder on the nub of his finger, it was untested. But it worked, and an article on the BBC website has got the video to prove it. The question is: how much of a limb or organ could we one day regrow with the stuff?

From the BBC story:

If they can perfect the technique, it might mean one day they could repair not just a severed finger, but severely burnt skin, or even damaged organs . . . They hope soon to start a clinical trial in Buenos Aires on a woman who has cancer of the oesophagus. The normal procedure in such cases is often deadly. Doctors remove the cancerous portion and try to stretch the stomach lining up to meet the shortened oesophagus. In the trial they will place the extra cellular matrix inside the body from where the portion of oesophagus has been removed, and hope to stimulate the cells around it to re-grow the missing portion.

So could limbs be re-grown? Dr Badylak is cautious, but believes the technology is potentially revolutionary.

"I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones. And that is a major step towards eventually doing the entire limb."

Source: BBC via PopSci

Image: Daily Mail

There's still a lot of uncertainty flying around about just how toxic nanomaterials that make their way into air, soil, and water supplies (or whether they're even toxic at all). And the researchers — Virginia Miller and John Lieske, say they're not sure whether these nanoparticles are naturally formed in the body, or if they're picked up from the environment. You can listen to an interview called with them here called "Nanoparticles and Disease." They'll also be heading up a session on nanotech and physiology at the Experimental Biology 2008 conference on Wednesday.

In her work, Miller injected lab animals' artery walls with nanoparticles and the walls became inflamed. Inflammatory response is a first step towards hardening, but clearly a lot more work is going to be needed before the issue of nanotoxicity is laid to rest. Still, would it hurt if Britta started making water filters that we could set to "nano"?

Source: NanoTechWire

Image: 3dscience.com, via ScienceBlog

John Kessler, lead author on the Journal of Neuroscience paper says it'll be at least a few years before you find the gel in your local hospital, and it hasn't been shown to work in humans yet. He plans to submit the gel to the Food and Drug Administration for approval as a pharmaceutical in the not-too-distant future.

Source: Northwestern University via EurekAlert

It's true...going in through the mouth, surgeons have coaxed people to cough up appendices, bile glands, and gall bladders and women have given birth to the same organs as well. Last year, the first "transvaginal nephrectomy" was performed. And doctors in Barcelona announced yesterday that they've done it again.

NOTES surgery is where it's at. By going in through a natural opening in the body, doctors only need to make a small incision in the vaginal wall, or stomach lining. Then they wheedle their way through the abdomen to the offending organ or tissue, snip snip, and they're out in no time. OK, in the first kidney operation, it took about 3 hours. No Biggie.

The best part? You the brave patient are out of the hospital in a day or two, with no visible scarring (though sometimes small external cuts are needed). Docs are understandably excited about this, and hell, why not swallow some laparoscopic surgical tools if it'll cure what ails you? Ladies: if you think you've got it bad because doctors like to exploit your female hardware, rest assured — plans are in the works to use the rectum and male urethra as future entry points.

from EurekAlert

It's very possible. Quentin Pankhurst, a physics professor at the University College of London, says:

Until now, pathologists had to stain tissue samples with brown dyes to help them determine whether they were normal or cancerous. In terms of streamlining the process, the main problem is that all of the results are open to interpretation and each test has to be individually checked by a specialist . . . We've been working in the relatively new area of biomagnetics to develop a technique which provides more quantitative and reliable results, whilst also enabling pathologists to identify abnormal tissue sections much more quickly.

Cancerous cells have a protein on their surface called HER2. We use a solution of HER2 antibodies, tagged with magnetic nanoparticles, to stain the tissue sample. Using the HistoMag we can detect the quantity of tagged antibodies which attach themselves to the HER2 protein, which in turn provides us with an accurate picture of the spread of cancerous cells.

According to a release about the new study:

[Medical researcher Dr. Stephen] Barr's team finds the results very exciting because it shows our bodies have a gene that is capable of stopping the spread of HIV. They are now trying to figure out why this gene does not work in people infected with HIV and if there is a way to turn this gene on in those individuals. "We hope that our research will lead to the design of new drugs and/or vaccines that can halt the person-to-person transmission of HIV and the spread of the virus in the body, thereby blocking the onset of AIDS."

There are always newly emerging drug-resistant strains of HIV so the push has been to develop more natural means of blocking the virus. The discovery of this gene, which is natural in our cells, might provide a different avenue. The gene prevents the assembly of the virus so in the future the idea would be to develop drugs or vaccines that can mimic the effects of this gene.

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV [Eurekalert and Scienceblogs]