Mother Gives Birth To Baby After Ovary Transplant

A sterile woman is to give birth to the world’s first baby conceived after a full ovary transplant.The 38-year-old was rendered infertile when her ovaries failed at the age of 15, causing her to suffer an early menopause. After receiving an ovary transplanted from her twin sister, the woman, who lives in London, is expected to give birth this week.
The pioneering surgery will give hope not only to more than 100,000 British women who suffer an early menopause, but also to those undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy for cancer. They could now freeze an ovary before beginning the treatment.

Transplant of windpipe with stem cells technology

Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. “This technique has great promise,” said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

Water Aerobics and Pregnancy

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Pregnant mothers who take water aerobics classes during pregnancy may reduce their need for pain medication during labor.
A team of researchers from at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Sao Paulo, Brazil, investigated the effects of water aerobics classes on a group of 71 expectant mothers. About half the women were randomly assigned to attend three 50 minutes sessions a week throughout their pregnancy; the other group did not take part in water aerobics.
“We found no statistically significant differences in the duration of labor or the type of delivery between the two groups. However, only 27 percent of women in the aquarobics group requested analgesia, compared to 65 percent in the control group. This represents a 58 percent reduction in requests,” Rosa Pereira, the study’s lead researcher, was quoted as saying.
Research also showed water aerobics is a safe form of exercise for pregnant women.
“We’ve shown that the regular practice of moderate water aerobics during pregnancy is not detrimental to the health of the mother or the child. In fact, the reduction in analgesia requests suggests that it can get women into better psycho-physical condition,” Pereira was quoted as saying.
SOURCE: Reproductive Health, 2008

Potential Drug Therapy for Quitting Smoking

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Researchers have uncovered information that may lead to a new medical treatment for nicotine addiction.
Cigarette smoking is one of the most widespread preventable causes of death and disease in developed countries. Annually, the habit is responsible for about 440,000 deaths and $160 billion in annual health-related costs nationwide.
The neuropeptide hypocretin-1 (Orexin A) may start a series of reactions in the body that maintains tobacco addiction in smokers. Targeting the chemical could offer a potential treatment for smoking cessation.
In rats, blocking hypocretin-1 receptors not only decreased their reliance on nicotine, it also eliminated the stimulatory effects nicotine had on the areas of the brain linked to rewards.
“This suggests that hypocretin-1 may play a major role in driving tobacco use in smokers to want more nicotine,” Paul Kenny, Ph.D., a research scientist at Scripps Florida, in Jupiter, Fla., was quoted as saying. “If we can find a way to effectively block this receptor, it could mean a novel way to help break people’s addiction to tobacco.”
Quitting smoking has proven to be a difficult task. Despite years of health warnings against tobacco, only 10 percent of smokers who attempt to quit stay smoke-free after one year.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online November 24, 2008

First Human Cloning

Cloning of human was previously thought to be almost impossible due to the characteristic of human eggs which will become paralysed (fail to divide) if the nucleus is removed from them. However, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang from South Korea , using human eggs (ovum) and human DNA, had created human embryos through cloning, but they had no plans to make babies who would grow up into walking, talking, duplicates of the women who had produced the eggs. Insteads, the scientist extracted stem cells from the microscopic balls of dividing cells known as blastocyst. This embryonic stem cells can become virtually any type of human tissue, potentially offering powerful treatments-even cures for damaging or diseased organs, spinal cord, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, skin transplant, organ transplant and more. Human cloning is currently a very controversial issues not only pertaining to ethic but also legal, social, moral and religious.

The South Korean researchers solved the division problem ("paralysed empty egg") by using the less matured eggs. They first "harvested" eggs from 16 volunteers, using the classic in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique (The women were given drugs to stimulate their ovaries to produce multiple eggs, which were then harvested through an outpatient surgical procedure). Then the scientists replaced the nuclei in the eggs from each woman with nuclei from cells in other part of the women's body, thereby exchanging the eggs that has incomplete DNA (egg always contain half of DNA material compared to other cell in the body) with the nucleus that has complete DNA. This "complete nucleus" was actually extracted from the cells in the layers surrounding the egg. In this case, they do not use the embryos left over from attempt at IVF.

The egg which contain a new "complete DNA" will divides until they form a cell ball called blastocyst (see photo). A Blastocyst consist of 100 cells and divided into inner cells mass and outer cell mass. Cells in the inner cell mass are very special as each of them can be extracted and culture into a bacth of specialized cells or tissues such as blood cells, nerve cells, skin cells etc. Cells in the inner cells mass is also known as Stem Cells.