Researchers are trying to find out more about the relationship between different NPs’ shapes, sizes and surface chemistries and how they behave in the human body.

Professor Markus Affolter is in charge of a zebra fish embryo study researching angiogenesis, which means the recruitment of new blood vessels as a normal process in growth and development, but also as an essential component of tumours’ metastatic pathway.

You and your family have probably heard that for years now. All over the world we are seeing a rise of bacteria that has developed ways to resist the harm drugs should cause them.

With a prevalence of about 1 in 10.000, Ataxia is considered a rare hereditary disease that attacks the central nervous system. As a result, it is not at the top of the list in terms of research topics for pharmaceutical companies.

The “ nano wrap ” that is being developed to be fitted around an amputee’s upper arm nerve bundle is the ambitious other part of the Smarthand’s robotic hand project.

It strikes mainly children and young adults by causing abnormal fluid transport mainly in their lungs, pancreas and intestine. At its most advanced stage, cystic fibrosis still leaves no alternative other than lung transplant.

Improving the long-term health prospects of transplant patients has proved an elusive target so far.

Whenever lamin mutations occur, the regulation of progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation in highly regenerative tissues, such as skin and muscles, spins out of control.

It is a damning neologism of our age, a new word combining the threat of two major health problems of epidemic-like proportions. In Europe alone, around 33 million adults are expected to be suffering from type-2 diabetes by 2010.

More than half of all deaths in Europe are caused by cardiovascular disease, and 80% of all these are due to atherosclerosis.

In Europe alone, autoimmune diseases that may target any body organ affect about 7% of the population.

Embryonic or neural stem cells are key tools for future studies on Parkinson’s disease or other degenerative diseases. So far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells implied the destruction of an embryo.

Spinal cord injuries cause myelopathy or damage to white matter or myelinated fiber tracts that carry signals to and from the brain. It also damages gray matter in the central part of the spine, causing segmental losses of interneurons and motorneurons.

Reconstructing the neuronal circuitry of a damaged spine looks like a much closer goal now.

He made sense of something Darwin was at pains to speculate about, but couldn’t quite argue persuasively.

We don’t really seem to know all that much about the organ we all come from.

For a neurodegenerative disease that strikes later in life with neuronal dysfunction and subsequent cell death by showing a mind-boggling heterogeneity of subtypes, spinocerebellar ataxia had not been adequately tackled for a long time.

Claudia Castillo’s brand new, tailor-made windpipe, which European scientists created last year by lining the cartilage of a donated trachea with her own stem cells, has been heralding a new “cells into organs” era.

The main thing about reaching a ripe old age seems to be about cracking the nut of those diseases affecting organ systems deriving substantially or exclusively from mesodermal cells, such as heart, vascular system, blood, kidneys, skeleton and musculature.

Since his seminal 1994 discovery of the Pax-6 gene as the universal master switch of eye formation, Professor Walter Gehring had to prove his point by expressing the mouse gene on the wings and legs of the fruit fly.