Like all humans, scientists come in every shape, size and color imaginable. Every now and then I run into a real character. That is most certainly the case with the subject of my story on the News@Northeastern today. Professor Michail Sitkovsky is a burly man with a mutinous brow and thick accent that makes everything ...
When I was in high school I read a book called Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice that I thought was going to define the rest of my life (I’ve always been kind of dramatic like that). It was about discovering the chemical compounds found in plants that cultures have been using for centuries, even millennia, ...
Earlier this year, I wrote a News@Northeastern story about Anand Asthagiri, a chemical engineering professor who is interested in how cells move around the body. The process, he says, is critical to understanding how wounds heals and diseases, such as cancer, reach a lethal metastatic stage. If we know what makes cells moves, we might ...
Uterine fibroids. Not something most of us like to talk about. What are they? Calcified deposits stuck to the lining of a woman’s uterus. Are they common? Yes. Are they dangerous? Not usually. Painful? Yes — when they get big enough….and they can weigh up to several pounds. Also, they can range from very soft ...
One of the big ideas in healthcare today is preventative medicine. Treat the causes instead of the symptoms, proponents say, and you’ll keep people healthy and avoid expensive procedures down the road. I wholeheartedly agree with this approach. To me, continuously investing in newer, better treatment strategies should be accompanied by a parallel efforts in ...
Today I met a pretty awesome person (who looks uncannily like my uncle). Professor of pharmaceutical sciences Ban-An Khaw is an immunology guy, or at least that’s how he classified himself when I asked for his background story. And what an interesting story it is! A few decades ago, Khaw figured out a way to ...
Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic these days. Chemotherapy, for example, blindly kills anything in its path — these drugs don’t distinguish between healthy cells and cancerous cells; they just kill cells. Period. Professor Vladimir Torchilin and his buddies at the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are developing nanoscale drug delivery technologies, which I ...
The other day I met pharmacy professor Roger Edwards, whose research focuses on the health benefits of breastfeeding. Edwards, who has a background in policy and improvement in public health, became interested in the area when he saw his wife struggle to fight societal and hospital norms in her determination to breast feed the first ...
Last week Coca Cola and Pepsi announced they would change the processing method for the molecule that gives our favorite soft drinks their caramel color, after California placed a chemical byproduct of the method on its list of known carcinogens. According to a study commissioned by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), ...
The biggest challenge to killing cancer cells is the “protective armor” or shield around a tumor — that’s according to Professor Mansoor Amiji of the Bouve College of Health Sciences‘ School of Pharmacy. Amiji’s lab is trying to find ways to break through that barrier using nanomedicine. Cancer cells grow in acidic, oxygen-deprived environments — ...