Studying Kangaroo Cartilage Could Help Human Treatment

Studying Kangaroo Cartilage Could Help Human Treatment

Studying Kangaroo Cartilage Could Help Human Treatment

New research shows that the kangaroo is a suitable alternative animal model for study of human shoulder cartilage biomechanics. Understanding the biomechanics of natural kangaroo shoulder cartilage could lead to the development of better artificial shoulder joint implants — an increasingly important therapeutic option as the population ages and outlives the glide performance lifespan of joint cartilage.

If you have survived years of pushing, pulling, lifting, lowering and rotational forces assaulting your shoulders, thank your healthy articular cartilage. It is the smooth, white, lubricating connective tissue covering the ends of bones that meet at a joint. Cartilage promotes low-friction movement and helps bones glide pain-free through a wide range of motion and many functions — when it’s healthy.8. Kangaroo

When cartilage degrades, a host of problems can emerge. Cartilage has limited ability for self-healing or repair. This is why one of the treatments for severely damaged cartilage at modern care centers is surgical implantation of an artificial joint. Yet many of these implants have performance problems.

Understanding the biomechanics of natural cartilage could lead to the development of better artificial joint implants. That’s exactly the goal of researchers at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. The team studied kangaroo cartilage as an analogue for human tissue, and found that a network of collagen protein close to the surface played an important role in helping the cartilage absorb forces without damaging. This behavior was different than that in most studies of knee cartilage, suggesting that artificial knee and shoulder joints may need to be engineered differently.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

Filling a research gap

The team studies shoulder cartilage issues because the shoulder can sustain injuries and eventually develops osteoarthritis — a growing concern in aging, active populations. “Knee cartilage has been studied extensively. However, there are only limited studies specifically focusing on shoulder cartilage tissues. We think [studying shoulder cartilage] is important, because, especially in sports activities, there is a possibility that the shoulder may get affected by injuries and eventual osteoarthritic development,” said Yuantong Gu, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology who led the team.

The team chose to experiment with the shoulder cartilage of a kangaroo as an analogue for human tissue, which is harder to obtain. The kangaroo is a suitable alternative animal model for the study of human shoulder cartilage biomechanics, the team believes, because the kangaroo has a bidpedal posture, is similar in size to a human (an adult male kangaroo can weigh nearly 150 pounds), and the kangaroo’s grabbing, punching and lifting limb action resembles human shoulder-mediated movements. Sheep, certain rats or mice species, or non-human primates are typically studied as animal models, but lack many of these human-like characteristics.

The researchers tested how kangaroo cartilage deformed in an “indentation test,” in which the tissue was pressed by a rounded rod. They then added enzymes to degrade specific components of the cartilage and re-ran the tests.

The team experimented with the degradation of two main components of cartilage tissue: proteoglycans, a type of protein that makes up much of the extracellular matrix between cells, and collagen, the main structural support protein in the matrix, which is also found in hair and nails. Both types of protein affected the load-bearing behavior of the cartilage, but the researchers identified the shoulder cartilage collagen network as the dominant player. This differed from other studies of the knee cartilage that identified proteoglycans as more dominant.

Improving implants

The researchers’ findings highlight that shoulder and knee cartilage could differ significantly in their response to external loadings. The results emphasize the need to engineer an artificial cartilage material to a specific shoulder or knee joint in such a way that it is customized to mimic the different local mechanical environment that the tissue is subjected to within a particular joint, Gu said.

To date, engineered cartilage materials have come across difficulties replicating the biomechanical properties of natural tissue — especially its durability, according to Gu. “We hope to improve the design and manufacture of artificial cartilage materials by applying our improved understanding of the key factors that contribute to the biomechanical properties of the natural cartilage,” he said.

Next, the team intends to validate and refine its findings. The ultimate goal is to apply their discoveries to enhance tissue engineering strategies and to design novel, biomechanically-enhanced cartilage substitutes for shoulder implants.

This article originally appeared on the science News section of the science daily website.

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Hybridization in Parasites

Hybridization in Parasites

Hybridization in Parasites

Hybridization in Parasites: Consequences for Adaptive Evolution, Pathogenesis, and Public Health in a Changing World

Publication-SeriesHybridization of parasites is an emerging public health concern at the interface of infectious disease biology and evolution. Increasing economic development, human migration, global trade, and climate change are all shifting the geographic distribution of existing human, livestock, companion animal, and wildlife parasites. As a result, human populations encounter new infections more frequently, and coinfection by multiple parasites from different lineages or species within individual hosts occurs. Coinfection may have a large impact on the hosts and parasites involved, often as a result of synergistic or antagonistic interactions between parasites. Indeed, mixed-species coinfections have been found to influence parasite establishment, growth, maturation, reproductive success, and/or drug efficacy. However, coinfections can allow for heterospecific (between-species or between-lineage) mate pairings, resulting in parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction in which eggs occur without fertilization), introgression (the introduction of single genes or chromosomal regions from one species into that of another through repeated backcrossing), and whole-genome admixture through hybridization.

Find out more by reading the full paper at the PLOS Pathogens website.

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Health innovations need much more than research

Health innovations need much more than research

Health innovations need much more than research

The challenges of developing and scaling up health innovations go beyond research. They need careful consideration.

Previously known as the Global Forum for Health Research, the Global Forum for Research and Innovation for Health, held last week in the Philippines, has been freshly rebranded to reflect the distinction between research and the development of innovation as a product or service.

This new title also acknowledges that health research is not the only research that affects health. Health outcomes are determined by a complex web of social, environmental and governance issues. A new multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral approach to research was referenced explicitly throughout the conference — often as a salutary example of the kind of collaboration that can help translate research into innovation.

There was another well-recognised aspect of good innovation practice shaping the new-look Forum: the notion of involving the ‘end user’ early on. The Philippines, for example, which hosted the meeting, had a substantive influence on the Forum’s agenda. This focused on discussing how to marshal support from influential people in policy and finance so as to get health innovations to large numbers of the mostvulnerable people.

Most chronically poor people now live in middle-income countries like the Philippines. So as, in his welcome address, the Filipino president said he was looking forward to solutions to the problems exercising his government, the organisers could argue they had aligned themselves to demand.

Although it is too early to tell whether this framing has supported the mainstreaming of innovations in any of the 72 countries attending the forum, the organisers’ emphasis did bring into focus health innovation issues that need to be carefully addressed.

Practical approaches

Firstly, there is little understanding among health researchers of the practicalities of ‘scaling’. The meeting participants assumed that any innovation worth developing is also worth scaling up — there was no considered discussion on the limits.

Glen Mays, of the University of Kentucky, pointed out that there is a science to scaling: a separate research protocol would be required for efficient rollout. Shelly Batra, of the NGO Operation ASHA, presented some interesting reflections on enabling conditions for scaling, and some instructive examples of failure.

“Technical innovation is needed to make these systematic review collections more dynamic. There also needs to be a form of systemic review to gather and assess innovations, not just research papers.”

Nick Ishmael Perkins, SciDev.Net

But overall, the body of knowledge on scaling up innovations was presented either as anecdotal and tacit, or as something tangential to the conference — ironic on both counts, in view of scale-up being central to how the event was framed.

Health professionals need to engage more strongly with knowledge systems like social innovations theory (which presents paradigms for analysing operating environments); complexity science (which offers insights for project planning in large dynamic ecosystems); and incubation management (which offers models for testing services and products).

Collaborative culture

Second, there was much reference to collaboration at the cabinet level. The joint leadership from the Forum’s hosts, which included the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Health, may signal a significant collaboration. Indeed, you would expect science ministries to demonstrate the value of research through close and ambitious partnerships with other line ministries. This could prove particularly useful for healthcare systems, where delivery encounters many different and urgent pressures.

However, the development and health sectors have little experience of providing efficient and sustained support to ministries of science and technology. Too often, and too quickly, conversations turn to private sector partnerships or needs assessments for other ministries. The nexus of relationships among academics, layers of policy actors and service providers — which should characterise a functional science and tech ministry — was clearly under-examined.

For instance, how would a ministry of science and technology facilitate reforms for healthcare systems if that is the key catalyst for innovation? Or how do middle-income countries support their researchers and industries to produce diagnostic technology? Such questions seem fundamental to the Forum’s agenda, yet went largely unanswered. Perhaps the right people were not in the room — but I suspect more effort is required to consolidate the necessary experience and departmental support.

Unhelpful assumptions

Delegates and speakers certainly endorsed the value of policy engagement. There were also sessions addressing new modes of engagement like social media. Again, though, there were some assumptions that need to be challenged.

First, there was an overwhelming notion that speeding up peer review would be the most critical step in expediting the process of innovation. This may help to build the necessary body of knowledge, but it fails to listen to what end users want to know as well as how and when they seek that information.

More fundamentally, however, these discussions on policy engagement tended to revert to research as opposed to innovation — or to underplay the development process for services or products as distinct from academic research.

An example of this was the discussion on systematic reviews — very useful for the academic community and crucial for development policy. The Cochrane Library serves the health sector well in this regard; 3ie also provides valuable reviews. But most systematic review repositories face the challenges of visibility and versatility: you need to know they are there (they are not built for aggregator services, which would make it easier to find them online).

Also, systematic reviews themselves are effectively supply-led — a policy maker has little space to refine the question tackled by a review or adjust it to their context. Technical innovation is needed to make these systematic review collections more dynamic. There also needs to be a form of systemic review to gather and assess innovations, not just research papers.

The next forum is in three years and, given the current strategic framing, we can be sure it will be in another middle-income country. Meanwhile, may the innovation continue!
This article originally appeared on the scidev.net website.
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60,000 Antelope Died in Four Days and No One Knows Why

60,000 Antelope Died in Four Days and No One Knows Why

60,000 Antelope Died in Four Days and No One Knows Why

It started in late May. When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground.

7. 60000 Antelopes died“But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed,” Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science.

But within four days, the entire herd — 60,000 saiga — had died. As veterinarians and conservationists tried to stem the die-off, they also got word of similar population crashes in other herds across Kazakhstan. By early June, the mass dying was over.

Now, the researchers have found clues as to how more than half of the country’s herd, counted at 257,000 as of 2014, died so rapidly. Bacteria clearly played a role in the saigas’ demise. But exactly how these normally harmless microbes could take such a toll is still a mystery, Zuther said.

“The extent of this die-off, and the speed it had, by spreading throughout the whole calving herd and killing all the animals, this has not been observed for any other species,” Zuther said. “It’s really unheard of.”

Saigas, which are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, live in a few herds in Kazakhstan, one small herd in Russia and a herd in Mongolia. The herds congregate with other herds during the cold winters, as well as when they migrate to other parts of Kazakhstan, during the fall and spring. The herds split up to calve their young during the late spring and early summer. The die-off started during the calving period.

Field workers were able to take detailed samples of the saigas’ environment — the rocks the animals walked on and the soil they crossed — as well as the water the animals drank and the vegetation they ate in the months and weeks leading up to the die-off.

The researchers additionally conducted high-quality necropsies of the animals, and even observed the behavior of some of the animals as they died. The females, which cluster together to calve their young, were hit the hardest. They died first, followed by their calves, which were still too young to eat any vegetation. That sequence suggested that whatever was killing off the animals was being transmitted through the mothers’ milk, Zuther said.

Tissue samples revealed that toxins, produced by Pasteurella and possibly Clostridia bacteria, caused extensive bleeding in most of the animals’ organs. But Pasteurella is found normally in the bodies of ruminants like the saigas, and it usually doesn’t cause harm unless the animals have weakened immune systems.

So far, the only possible environmental cause was that there was a cold, hard winter followed by a wet spring, with lots of lush vegetation and standing water on the ground that could enable bacteria to spread more easily, Zuther said. That by itself doesn’t seem so unusual, though, he said.

Another possibility is that such flash crashes are inevitable responses to some natural variations in the environment, he said. Zuther said he and his colleagues plan to continue their search for a cause of the die-off.

This article originally posted on the NBC news website.

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Why science needs to publish negative results

Why science needs to publish negative results

Why science needs to publish negative results

An Elsevier publisher argues that an experiment shouldn’t have to show positive results to earn its place in the published literature

Emma Granqvist, a journal Publisher for Elsevier’s plant sciences, is behind the recent launch of the open access journal New Negatives in Plant Science, a platform for negative, unexpected or controversial results in the field. The journal is viewed as a pilot and may lead to New Negatives in… titles for other research disciplines.

In this article, Granqvist explains why she believes scientists should move away from positive bias to ensure all research results are shared through peer review.

Many experimental results never see the light of publication day. For a large number of these, it comes down to the data being “negative”, i.e. the expected and/or wanted effect was not observed. A straightforward example might be the testing of a soil additive that is believed to help a plant grow. If the experiment outcome shows no difference between the standard soil and the soil with the additive, then the result will end up buried in the laboratory’s archive.

But is this really the best approach to scientific results?

Reducing the positive bias in the scientific literature

Ignoring the vast information source that is negative results is troublesome in several ways. Firstly, it skews the scientific literature by only including chosen pieces of information. Secondly, it causes a huge waste of time and resources, as other scientists considering the same questions may perform the same experiments.

Furthermore, given that positive results are published, whereas negative data will struggle, it is extremely difficult to correct the scientific record for false positives; controversial studies that conflict with or cannot reproduce previously published studies are seldom given space in peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the argument is given that negative data “cannot be trusted”. But as was pointed out in the 2013 article “Trouble at the Lab” in The Economist, negative data are statistically more trustworthy than positive data.

Given that restrictions in publication space is becoming outdated in today’s world of digital information, it would be more efficient and un-biased if all results were made available to the interested scientific community. For the funding bodies this holds an additional benefit: a grant funding research that resulted in negative data would then still result in publications and shared information.

New Negatives in Plant Science – a pilot journal

To raise this important issue, and put the spotlight on negative and controversial data, the journal New Negatives in Plant Science was launched in 2014. It is an open access journal that publishes both research articles and commentaries. While there are other journals that welcome negative results, New Negatives in Plant Science aims to encourage and drive scientific debate by giving these studies a place of their own.

The editors, Dr. Thomas W. Okita of Washington State University and Dr. José A. Olivares of Los Alamos National Laboratory, point out that this information can be valuable to the scientific community in a number of ways, for example, by helping others to avoid repeating the same experiments as well as encouraging new hypothesis building.

Currently two Special Issues of the journal are being prepared; one on Controversial issues in Plant Carbohydrate Metabolism and one on Negative Data on Nutrient Use Efficiency in Plants.

Positive reactions

There have been a great number of positive reactions from the community around the launch of the journal. In a recent quiz on the journal’s homepage, many scientists explained why they thought negative and controversial results should be published for public consumption. A few of their comments are shown below. The winner of the journal’s quiz was awarded a travel grant to the Elsevier Current Opinion conference on Plant Genome Evolution. Thanks to all quiz participants for your contributions!

  • Be bold, and simply let the world know what you ‘negatively‘ know. Jickerson P. Lado
  • It will bring openness to the scientific community and stimulate innovation. Leonard Rusinamhodzi
  • I would prefer to read negative as well as positive results in a very well-balanced way so that I can receive as much information as possible … Saudan Singh

This article originally appears on the innovation in publishing section of the Elsevier website.

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Ethics and Best Practices in Sharing Individual-level Research Data

Ethics and Best Practices in Sharing Individual-level Research Data

Ethics and Best Practices in Sharing Individual-level Research Data

A new, open-access toolkit for researchers and data managers is released today, providing guidance, resources and an eLearning course about ethics and best practices of sharing individual-level health research data in Low and Medium Income Countries.

Data Sharing

Clinical research helps collect a lot of data through various studies, which are then managed and used for publications or to inform public health policies.

One of the issues faced though is that of data sharing between researchers and the rules and regulations surrounding it.
Data sharing can involve partner researchers/countries within the same study or trial (multi-countries studies) , within the same consortium (set of studies), or with external researchers wanting to have another look at the data after the study is finished and published.
Do you have experience of dealing with data sharing, how did you do it? Do you have rules and regulations in place that you follow to ensure data protection principles is upheld (eg. the data protection act in the UK)? How do you deal with identifiable vs non identifiable data.

From a different perspective, when sharing is possible, how do you technically do it. Do you simply zip and send, use dropbox or similar online tools, or do you have a commercial or custom built system? Do you follow any standards? How do you deal with security or does it not matter?

Another reason this is important is that most of the research is generally funded by public money and there is growing requirement from funders to ensure that data generated is shared . So some of us are already facing these issues, and sooner or later most institutions will be in similar situations.

For more tips and tricks visit the website Resource Centre for ethics and sharing individual-level research data.

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