Reviving Eyes, Cancer Progress, and Breeding Coral Reefs

Eyes Come Back to Life

Over 250 million people around the world experience vision loss and around 43 million people are blind. For many years, researchers have studied the eyes of mice for an understanding of how our human eyes work, yet mouse eyes have striking differences—they don’t see in color, they have no macula (what’s responsible for our central vision), so they can’t develop macular degeneration (which is a common cause of devastating vision loss in humans including my grandmother).

For six years, Dr. Anne Hanneken has been working to revive eyes from the deceased. The goal is for scientists to eventually carry out experiments on functioning human eyes, increasing our understanding of the factors and diseases causing vision loss so that treatments may potentially be created. Another benefit would be accelerating the concept of eye transplants.

Dr. Hanneken and Frans Vinberg worked together to find that eyes recovered from a patient within 30-60 minutes after life support was removed were still functioning. The eyes could detect the whole light-signaling cascade (they could still respond to light). However, they are unable to prove if the eyes can see since they’re no longer connected to the brain.

This new finding will allow scientists to conduct experiments that are impossible on living people with the goal of finding cures for certain forms of blindness. Imagine what else could be revived and what advances in medicine can be gained!

R. Winslow. A Spark of Life After Death Points to New Hope for Blindness. The Wall Street Journal. September 4, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-spark-of-life-after-death-points-to-new-hope-for-blindness-11662303872?st=xfkwkkgk21xkqoa&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink.

Does Air Pollution Cause Cancer?

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London and University College Londen have proposed a new concept of how air pollution affects cancer. Their discovery: our cell’s DNA is already damaged, but something, such as air pollution can trigger that DNA thus making it cancerous.

Their discovery came from studying how non-smokers can acquire lung cancer (which happens disturbingly often).

Through their experiments, they found that there were more non-smokers with lung cancer in locations with high air pollution. Breathing in the pollution (specifically a type called PM2.5) releases a chemical in the lungs causing inflammation and cell activation. They also studied mice that have been exposed to air pollution and found that using a specific drug can stop a signal that causes cancer.  The study is great progress towards our understanding of cancer and its treatments!

J. Gallagher. Cancer Rules Rewritten by Air Pollution Discovery. BBC News. September 10, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62797777.

Saving the Caribbean

All across the world, coral ecosystems are dying. Reefs are not only habitats for fish and other sea creatures, but they act as coastal protection and produce oxygen. It is estimated that with climate change, all of the reefs on earth could be dead at the end of this century. As ocean temperatures rise, coral bleaching occurs: when the symbiotic algae that produces nutrients for coral gets driven out.

Elkhorn coral has been an endangered species since 2006, and until recently was incredibly challenging to grow in aquariums. Keri O’Neil, a scientist at the Tampa Aquarium’s spawning center and her colleagues recently spawned the coral in the aquarium. Her experiment created thousands of baby Elkhorn coral (this is big!). Understanding how this coral can spawn outside of the ocean may be crucial to addressing climate change. They hope to be able to breed coral so that they can resist the effects of climate change and other events.

I. Rosales. Scientists Make Major Breakthrough in Race to Save Carribean Coral. CNN. September 5, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/04/us/elkhorn-coral-spawn-florida-aquarium-climate/index.html.

Tumors are Full of Microbes and Fungi

You probably know mushrooms, mold, and yeast are types of fungi, but did you know that fungi can be found inside of you? Some fungi live on our skin and break down oils, others feed on sugar from our mouths, however, some fungi inside of us are still widely unknown. Healthy bodies are home to fungi, but in a recent study, fungi have even been found in tumors. In 35 different cancers and tumors from 7 parts of the body, fungi was present in each one.

The research was conducted in combination by a team at UCSD and Narunsky Haziza and Ravid Strausman’s teams at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Haziza and Strausman had originally been studying the microbes (small organisms, often bacterium responsible for disease) of tumors. The team at UCSD led by Dr. Speich-Poore has even founded a company to turn their research findings into a blood test to detect cancer. The test would be able to determine what kind of cancer the microbes had come from. The scientists are finding that certain microbes lead to worse cancer outcomes. This is great progress towards understanding how tumors work and finding potential new ways to diagnose cancer!

C. Zimmerman. A New Approach to Spotting Tumors. The New York Times. September 29, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/science/cancer-tumors-fungi-bacteria-microbiome.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.