Iranians Develop Sperm Cells from Human Skin

Iranian researchers in collaboration with their Canadian colleagues managed to create early sperm cells called primordial germ cells (PGCs) from human skin.

Different Cancers Share Same Genetic Flaw

When scientists at the BC Cancer Agency studied the genetic signatures of three different types of cancer, they expected each tumor would have its own distinct abnormalities.
But to their surprise, the researchers discovered that the tumors--rare forms of ovarian, uterine and testicular cancers--all exhibited the same genetic flaw, Shine.yahoo said.
They were amazed to discover that the same mutation in what’s known as the DICER gene showed up as the common process underlying all the different cancers they examined.
“And so what we’re looking at is a series of cancers which no one would ever have binned together before, which share mutations in the same gene,” genetic pathologist Dr. David Huntsman said from Vancouver.
“And it suggests that maybe we need to start rethinking the way we define cancers,” said Huntsman, co-principal author of a paper on the research published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Once you start defining cancers by what they are, rather than where they occur, you find that there are cancers across the body that share features, which perhaps could be treated the same way.”
Huntsman said that once scientists determine what the mutated DICER gene does exactly and figure out a way to target it, “you could have a treatment that is applicable across a group of cancer types, which no one would ever have considered putting together in a clinical trial”.

Obesity, Esophageal Cancer Deaths Interlinked

Obese people who have had surgery to treat esophageal cancer are twice as likely to have a recurrence of the disease or die from cancer within five years as patients of normal weight, according to a new study.
In the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., suggested their findings could change the way some doctors treat obese patients with this type of cancer, HealthDay reported.
The investigators followed 778 people who had surgery for esophageal cancer and found that those who were classified as obese (a body mass index of 30 or higher) had a five-year survival rate of 18 percent. That survival rate jumped to 36 percent among people who were not overweight.
“Obesity is considered a risk factor in the development of this cancer, which is known to be both highly lethal and increasingly common,” the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Harry Yoon, an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in a Mayo news release.
“But prior to this study, we did not really understand the impact of obesity in this upper gastrointestinal cancer.”
The study authors pointed out that their findings applied only to nonsmokers who had their esophagus removed.
Yoon added that previous research has linked obesity to greater risk for cancer as well as increased risk of death from other types of tumors because extra weight results in a chronic inflammatory state.

 “For the first time in the world, Iranian and Canadian scientists succeeded in creating PGC from the skin of an infertile person,” Karim Nayernia, an Iranian geneticist, told Fars News Agency.
The project was conducted by Iranian scientists in cooperation with their Georgian and Canadian counterparts.
Nayernia noted that 17 Iranian students in different universities of the country were working on the technology to produce PGC from skin cells and an essay has been written on the issue.
Earlier, a research team from Kyoto University succeeded in turning mouse embryonic stem cells into early sperm cells. When these were transplanted into infertile mice, the animal played ‘host’ as the stem cells developed into normal-looking sperm.
These eggs were then transplanted into a female mouse and healthy offspring were born. They grew into fertile male and female adult mice.
The team suggested that the same procedure could be carried out using stem cells derived from adult skin cells.
Nevertheless, Nayernia said the new discovery was the result of an earlier research project that he and his colleagues had conducted on mice.
Nayernia said he and his colleagues had “started reprogramming mouse stem cells to create sperm cells in research projects in Germany, England and Canada 10 years ago”, adding that the research project yielded fully successful results, “and we could for the first time produce mouse sperm in laboratory”.