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The strain was contracted by a British man who was eventually treated, but it's feared more cases will appear after two more emerged in Australia.

The man had a regular female partner in the UK but picked up the infection after a sexual encounter with a woman in south-east Asia, Public Health England (PHE) said.

"We are pleased to report that the case of multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea has been successfully treated," said Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of PHE's sexually transmitted infection (STI) section. "Investigations have also revealed there has been no further spread of this infection within the UK."

Initially attempts to get rid of the STI with the usual combination of antibiotics azithromycin and ceftriaxone failed.

The patient was successfully treated after three days of intravenous treatment with antibiotic ertapenem, the PHE report said.

Dr Hughes said: "Two similar cases have just been reported in Australia and serve as a timely reminder that we expect to see further cases of multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea in the future. These cases will be challenging for healthcare professionals to manage."

The sexually transmitted disease is the latest in a string of conditions that are now becoming harder to treat as antibiotic overuse renders the drugs ineffective.

It is believed to be the first time globally that the infection could not be treated with first-choice antibiotics.

"We urge the public to avoid getting or passing on gonorrhoea by using condoms consistently and correctly with all new and casual partners," Dr Hughes said.

Gonorrhea can lead to infertility if left untreated. Symptoms include discharge and inflammation.

Online Editors

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Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea cases expected to emerge worldwide - Independent.ie

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The strain was contracted by a British man who was eventually treated, but it's feared more cases will appear after two more emerged in Australia. The man had a regular female partner in the UK but picked up the infection after a sexual encounter with a woman in south-east Asia, Public Health England (PHE) said.

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Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea cases expected to emerge worldwide

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This means we may be very close to growing organs for human use (kidneys, liver, lungs maybe even a heart)
What do you guys think? Using animals to grow organs?
Ethically correct or not ?

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Advance brings us closer to growing transplant organs inside animals or being able to genetically tailor compatible organs, say researchers

Growing human organs inside other animals has taken another step away from science-fiction, with researchers announcing they have grown sheep embryos containing human cells.

Scientists say growing human organs inside animals could not only increase supply, but also offer the possibility of genetically tailoring the organs to be compatible with the immune system of the patient receiving them, by using the patient's own cells in the procedure, removing the possibility of rejection.

According to NHS Blood and Transplant, almost 460 people died in 2016 waiting for organs, while those who do receive transplants sometimes see organs rejected.

"Even today the best matched organs, except if they come from identical twins, don't last very long because with time the immune system continuously is attacking them," said Dr Pablo Ross from the University of California, Davis, who is part of the team working towards growing human organs in other species.

Ross added that if it does become possible to grow human organs inside other species, it might be that organ transplants become a possibility beyond critical conditions.

Bruce Whitelaw, professor of animal biotechnology at the Roslin Institute, where Dolly the sheep was created, said that while there was a long way to go before human organs could be grown in other animals, the latest research is "an important step forward through starting to explore whether sheep offer an option for the exciting 'chimeric' project."

The approach is different to xenotransplantation, in which an organ that belongs to another species is transplanted into humans. While that is another possibility for tackling the dearth of organs, rejection would still be a problem.

Attempts by scientists to grow organs from one species inside another is an ongoing mission: among previous efforts, scientists have grown a rat pancreas inside a mouse.

But Ross and colleagues have recently reported a major breakthrough for our own species, revealing they were able to introduce human stem cells into early pig embryos, producing embryos for which about one in every 100,000 cells were human. These chimeras - a term adopted from Greek mythology - were only allowed to develop for 28 days.

Now, at this week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas, the team have announced that they have managed a similar feat with sheep embryos, achieving an even higher ratio of human to animal cells. "About one in 10,000 cells in these sheep embryos are human," said Ross.

The team say they have already been able to use genome editing techniques to produce pig and sheep embryos that are unable to develop a pancreas, although they are still working on the approach. The hope is that the human cells introduced to such embryos would grow to replace the missing organ.

The team are currently allowed to let the chimeric embryos develop for 28 days, 21 of which are in the sheep. While that might be sufficient to see the development of the missing organ when human cells are eventually combined with the genetically modified embryo, Dr Hiro Nakauchi of Stanford University, who is part of the team, said a longer experiment, perhaps up to 70 days, would be more convincing, although that would require additional permission from institutional review boards.

But, Ross said, for the approach to work it is thought that about 1% of the embryo's cells would have to be human, meaning further work is needed to increase the proportion of human cells in the chimera.

chimera graphic

Ross added there are several advantages to using sheep embryos, including that they can easily be produced by IVF, and that fewer embryos need to be transplanted into an adult, meaning fewer embryos are needed for an experiment.

"For a pig we typically transfer 50 embryos to one recipient," said Ross. "With the sheep we transfer four embryos to one recipient."

Sheep also have certain organs - such as the heart and lungs - that are similar to ours, and their embryos have been shown to form chimeras with goat embryos to produce " geeps ". Like pigs, sheep produce organs of about the right size for the human body.

Research with pigs is continuing, said Ross, noting that they have other benefits including speed of growth and the ability to produce more young at one time than sheep, meaning fewer animals are needed to produce more data.

But ethical concerns abound, not least whether chimeras could end up with a human-like mind.

"I have the same concerns," said Ross, adding that the team are looking at where the human cells end up in the chimera. "Let ' s say that if our results indicate that the human cells all go to the brain of the animal, then we may never carry this forward," he said.

Nakauchi is optimistic that humans will eventually be able to receive organs grown in animals. "It could take five years or it could take 10 years but I think eventually we will be able to do this," he said.

Nakauchi also played down concerns: "The contribution of human cells so far is very small. It's nothing like a pig with a human face or human brain," he said. "We have published several papers showing we can target the region, so we can avoid human cells differentiating in to the human brain or human gonads."

Other potential issues includethat viruses within the DNA of the host could infect human cells, while the human organ might contain blood vessels composed of cells from the "host" animal. "The organs could not be used for transplants into humans without triggering the immune system to reject them - and this would probably be a very fast rejection," said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of the division of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

However, recent developments in gene editing have allowed scientists to develop piglets without such viruses, potentially smoothing the way, while Ross notes that human cells might replace any remaining host cells after transplantation.

Currently, the US National Institutes of Health has a moratorium on funding such research, but it is looking to lift this and replace it with a review process. In the UK scientists must apply to the Home Office for a license to carry out such research.
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Breakthrough as scientists grow sheep embryos containing human cells

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Advance brings us closer to growing transplant organs inside animals or being able to genetically tailor compatible organs, say researchers Growing human organs inside other animals has taken another step away from science-fiction, with researchers announcing they have grown sheep embryos containing human cells.

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Potential key to halting breast cancer's spread discovered by scientists

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Depriving tumours of asparagine, which is abundant in asparagus, appears to prevent tumours spreading. Photo: Getty

A single molecule can have a profound effect on the ability of breast cancer to spread to other parts of the body, scientists have revealed.

Most breast cancer patients do not die from their initial tumour, but from secondary malignant growths (metastases), where cancer cells are able to enter the blood and survive to invade new sites.

Asparagine, a molecule named after asparagus where it was first identified in high quantities, has now been shown to be an essential ingredient for tumour cells to gain these migratory properties.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown how limiting the body's production of this amino acid - a building block for larger protein molecules in the body - or curbing it with drugs or dietary restrictions, significantly reduced the ability of breast cancers to spread.

The results have yet to be shown in human trial, but after tests on mice, academics said in future an asparagine restrictive diet and treatment could be given after surgery to remove the primary tumour.

The same pathway is also likely to be important for spreading other tumours, including neck and kidney cancers.

"Our work has pinpointed one of the key mechanisms that promotes the ability of breast cancer cells to spread," said Professor Greg Hannon, lead author of the study based at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

"When the availability of asparagine was reduced, we saw little impact on the primary tumour in the breast, but tumour cells had reduced capacity for metastases in other parts of the body.

"In the future, restricting this amino acid through a controlled diet plan or by other means could be an additional part of treatment for some patients with breast and other cancers."

Asparagine is also found in soy products, poultry and shellfish, but Cancer Research UK - which part funded this study - cautioned that dietary restriction of high-asparagine foods has not been shown to be effective in human cancer patients yet.

It recommended that they speak with their doctor before making diet changes.

In the study, published in the journal Nature, the team showed that a blood cancer chemotherapy drug called L-asparaginase and a low asparagine diet significantly reduced cancer spreading in mice.

This is because the human body can produce asparagine, but tumour cells are unable to. They rely on freely circulating levels of the molecule in the blood, which L-asparagine breaks down.

The scientists used genetic modification techniques to "silence" a gene called ASNS (asparagine synthetase) in mice.

Humans also have this gene, which allows them to produce asparagine biologically. It is more active in the types of tumour that spread most aggressively.

The research team found that this genetic alteration had the same effect in reducing the spread of cancer, or made new metastases smaller with a combination of techniques producing the best results - and in some cases even shrinking the primary tumour.

The team then conducted a secondary exercise looking at data from human breast cancer patients and showed those who had more active ASNS genes (producing more asparagine) were more likely to have had their cancer spread and this also held true in other cancer types they looked at.

Professor Charles Swanton, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "This is interesting research looking at how cutting off the supply of nutrients essential to cancer's spread could help restrain tumours.

"The next step in the research would be to understand how this translates from the lab to patients and which patients are most likely to benefit from any potential treatment."

Online Editors

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Potential key to halting breast cancer's spread discovered by scientists - Independent.ie

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A single molecule can have a profound effect on the ability of breast cancer to spread to other parts of the body, scientists have revealed. Most breast cancer patients do not die from their initial tumour, but from secondary malignant growths (metastases), where cancer cells are able to enter the blood and survive to invade new sites.

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Blood test which may detect Alzheimer’s 

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Blood test which may detect Alzheimer’s 

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The blood test is for a perticular protein. Have a read ..... very interesting

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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease, for which there is no cure. Hundreds of research studies are ongoing, and those studies are essential to finding a cause, possible treatments and a way to detect the disease before it has progressed too far. Estimates from the WHO and the CDC show that nearly 15 million Americans suffer from the disorder and worldwide that number jumps to more than 44 million. The numbers are going nowhere but up, and it's become a global health concern.

Scientists in Japan and Australia have developed a blood test that they believe can detect levels of a protein that is associated with AD. Tau protein in the brain is what causes cognitive decline and loss of motor function in patients with AD. It can sometimes be detected in blood tests, but these proteins get broken down in the bloodstream and do not reliably show up in the currently available biomarker assays. Beta-amyloid deposits can be seen on PET scans of the brain, but by the time they are visible on imaging scans, the disease has progressed too far for much to be done.

If the test is found to be accurate in further research, the benefit could be that clinical trials will be designed better and yield more useful results. Since there is no precise way to tell what stage of AD a patient might be in, finding subjects for drug trials can be hit or miss. PET scans are not reliable enough and measuring levels of protein in cerebral spinal fluid is uncomfortable for the study participants and expensive. To date, every drug for Alzheimer's has failed in clinical trials. Part of the reason could be that the participants might have advanced disease and many of the drugs are meant to help those in the early stages since slowing the progression of AD has been the goal of many trials.

Molecular biologist Katsuhiko Yanagisawa at the Center for Development of Advanced Medicine for Dementia in Obu, Japan, and his colleagues developed the most recent prototype biomarker test. Their work is published online in the journal Nature 1. Brisbane-based scientist James Doecke, who was also involved in the research, said that it had been a "very difficult journey" in refining the test. Blood samples were collected every 18 months to two years from 121 patients in Japan and 252 patients in Australia. The study patients underwent PET scans and tests of cerebral spinal fluid as well, and the results of the blood tests were compared to those tests to assess accuracy. Dr. Doecke explained, "A lot of labs around the world have designed an assay and tried to find the protein in the blood that we can test easily that will be correlated with the disease, and nobody's come up until now with something this strong. Previously we've only been 80 percent accurate, and now we're greater than 90 [per cent] - what it means is that we can better direct our clinical trials to the right population."

Colin Masters, a professor at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health has studied AD for three decades. He told ABC news in Australia, "The performance of the blood test is so good, it has accuracy of approximately 90 percent." Measuring the small fragments of amyloid-β fragments in blood samples, including another protein that is a precursor to amyloid-β involved combining two existing methods, immunoprecipitation and mass spectroscopy. These techniques are being fine-tuned by the researchers who hope to conduct more extensive trials to validate these early results. The video below features Professor Masters explaining more about the research, check it out.

Sources: Nature, ABC Australia, Journal article, Nature

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Could This Blood Test Diagnose Alzheimer's?

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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease, for which there is no cure. Hundreds of research studies are ongoing, and those studies are essential to finding a cause, possible treatments and a way to detect the disease before it has progressed too far.

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Which is the most common in the world from the picture ???

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Tomorrow we will look at Anaphase.
This little gem of a cartoon sums up the stage perfectly 😂

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The magic of cell life, taken at the Exploratorium.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RNdARaa_EE

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Please post your links to cell division videos ????