Stem cells offer promising key to new malaria drugs: U.S. research | Reuters: "Human stem cells engineered to produce renewable sources of mature, liver-like cells can be grown and infected with malaria to test potentially life-saving new drugs, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The advance comes at a time when the parasitic mosquito-borne disease, which kills nearly 600,000 people every year, is showing increased resistance to current treatment, especially in Southeast Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
The liver-like cells, or hepatocytes, in the MIT study were manufactured from stem cells derived from donated skin and blood samples.
The resulting cells provide a potentially replenishable platform for testing drugs that target the early stage of malaria, when parasites may linger and multiply in the liver for weeks before spreading into the bloodstream."
'via Blog this'
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment