LOS ANGELES As cancer maintains its standing as the second leading cause of death in the U.S., researchers have continued their quest for safer and more effective treatments. Among the most promising advances has been the rise of nanomedicine, the application of tiny materials and devices whose sizes are measured in the billionths of a meter to detect, diagnose and treat disease. A new research review co-authored by a UCLA professor provides one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of research on nanomedicine-based approaches to treating cancer and offers insight into how researchers can best position nanomedicine-based cancer treatments for FDA approval. The article, by Dean Ho, professor of oral biology and medicine at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and Edward Chow, assistant professor at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and the National University of Singapore, was published online by the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine. Ho and Chow describe the paths that nanotechnology-enabled therapies could take and the regulatory and funding obstacles they could encounter as they progress through safety and efficacy studies. "Manufacturing, safety and toxicity studies that will be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration before clinical studies are just some of the considerations … Continue reading →

December 17, 2013 Today, December 17, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, has published a novel technique that could resolve a snag in stem cell research for application in regenerative medicine-a strategy for reprograming cells in vivo to act like stem cells that forgoes the risk of causing tumors. Dr. Kostas Kostarelos, principal investigator of the Nanomedicine Lab at the University of Manchester, said that he and his colleagues have discovered a safe approach to reprogramming somatic cells (which constitute most of the cells in the body) into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Research in this field has been embraced as an alternative to the controversial use of embryonic stem cells. "We have induced somatic cells within the liver of adult mice to transiently behave as pluripotent stem cells," said Dr. Kostas Kostarelos, the lab's principal investigator, "This was done by transfer of four specific genes, previously described by the Nobel-prize winning Shinya Yamanaka, without the use of viruses but simply plasmid DNA [a small circular, double-stranded piece of DNA used for manipulating gene expression in a cell]." The technique comes as an alternative to Dr. Shinya Yamanaka's reprograming methods, which won him the Nobel prize in 2012. Dr. Yamanaka's … Continue reading →