Insulin shows great potential against chronic colitis

Millions of people take insulin every day to treat their diabetes. But diabetes is not the only disease on which insulin has an effect, it appears. Chronic bowel inflammation can be treated effectively by injecting insulin into the rectum, it appears from a new study, where researchers have tested the treatment on mice. Lead researcher said that new treatment with insulin on mice shows great potential against chronic bowel inflammation in humans like Colitis Ulcerosa, which causes a lot of people great discomfort. Existing treatments attack the bowel's immune system, dampening it; instead the method strengthens the bowel cells' own defence. It appears to work equally well, and it can probably be used in combination with existing treatments. It has examined the effect of the treatment in a series of tests on mice with chronic colitis of the type Colitis Ulcerosa, among others, from which 20,000 Danes suffer. The cause of these bowel disorders is unknown, but they cause patients great discomfort and can involve bloody diarrhea, anemia, stomach ache and weight loss. The researchers have studied the effect of the insulin treatment in various ways. First, they have shown that the amount of inflammation, expressed as the level of the marker Cox2, drops by 50 per cent compared to the saltwater control treatment. That is more or less the same effect shown in tests on mice prior to the launch of the existing treatment in the market. Second, the researchers have measured the body weight of the mice, that people suffering from colitis typically lose a lot of weight because they do not eat much. As this marker is relatively crude, some studies of the existing treatment have shown no effect at all. However, using the new insulin treatment the mice lose 15-20 per cent less weight than the control group, and following treatment they gain weight 50 per cent faster, which is an important sign of health. The insulin works because it activates a gene inside the bowel cells, which, according to other studies, has an antioxidant effect and thus may be able to protect the bowel cells from inflammation. This makes the new treatment different from existing medication, which instead of strengthening the bowel's defence weakens the immune system's attack on the bowel. And therefore the researchers hope the new treatment can be combined with the existing.

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    Immune cell shapes: Fighting lung cancers

The scientists were able to swiftly analyze hundreds of tissue images to not only count cancer-associated immune cells but identify patterns in how they were arranged. That breakthrough view can now help determine which patients need chemotherapy or immunotherapy based on computational analysis of routine tissue-slide images obtained either by surgery or biopsy. While this published research focused on early-stage lung cancer tissue, further analysis also predicted the success of immunotherapy in late-stage lung cancer. Oncologists and pathologists routinely take a tissue sample of cancer cells and then capture an image of that tissue. But the advent of deep-learning and machine-learning algorithms has allowed researchers to find patterns among the cells that would otherwise be nearly impossible for the human eye to detect. Most often, that means analyzing cancer cells themselves, or with limited success, counting the white blood cells, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, which the body sends out to battle the cancer. Lead researcher said, One of the big problems is that cancer generally masks the immune response, which is why, to the body, cancer doesn't present as a foreign invader. For that reason, pathologists have been trying for the last 10 to 15 years to better understand how that immune response might correlate to how the cancer would spread or how the patient would respond to certain therapies or whether the patient even needs the invasive and painful chemotherapy routinely give to virtually all cancer victims. Since 2016, researcher have received over $9.5 million from the National Cancer Institute to develop computational tools for analysis of digital pathology images of breast, lung and head and neck cancers to identify which patients with these diseases could be spared aggressive radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

SOURCE: HealthDay News, September 2018

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                                            Researchers seek vaccine for traveler's diarrhea

Every year, millions of people have vacations and business trips ruined when they succumb to traveler's diarrhea during their journeys. A major cause of traveler's diarrhea is bacteria called Enterotoxigenic E. coli, or ETEC. Now researcher has discovered how ETEC works to cause disease. They are using this information in an effort to develop a preventive vaccine for travelers. The researchers taken to study samples directly from citizens who volunteered to become infected with ETEC. Ingesting contaminated food or water can lead to ETEC infection, which can cause diarrhea for up to a week. Considering the fact that up to 200 million people become infected annually, an estimated 1 billion days of human productivity are lost every year due to ETEC infections. Visiting the doctor to get vaccinated before a trip can prevent travelers from catching a disease. The group examined how ETEC behaved inside humans during infection compared to how it behaved in the laboratory. They were surprised to find that ETEC produced more toxins when grown in the laboratory than it did in human infection samples. Bewildered, the researchers sought to figure out why. They discovered that ETEC could sense oxygen in the atmosphere, and that controlled the amount of toxins produced by ETEC. This explained their surprising data: There is more oxygen in the atmosphere than there is in the digestive tract, which resulted in the differing levels of toxin expression. This breakthrough gives researchers hope that they have identified the "cue" that ETEC uses to determine when to make toxins that cause disease. How ETEC causes disease via toxins has been studied exhaustively for decades. Previous groups have identified numerous factors that contribute to toxin production in ETEC, but this is the first-time oxygen has been identified as a major player in ETEC virulence. Lead researcher said that ETEC can sense the oxygen given off by our own cells as a cue to produce toxins & hopes to use this oxygen-sensitive ETEC response against the bacteria to prevent infections.

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