Flies give insights on eye disease 

Research in Portugal has taken a step forward in understanding blindness, through the eyes of fruit flies.  

Retinitis pigmentosa – an eye disease which causes progressive degeneration of the retina and vision loss - is a major cause of human blindness.  

A team from ITQB NOVA and EARA member Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, has now identified a way to produce rhodopsin – a protein that is crucial for animal sight. 

The study, published in EMBO Reports, used fruit flies and human cells as models, to better understand how the production of rhodopsin is regulated.  

The work included a collaboration with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK, and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia. 

A better tool to track how nanoparticles deliver drug treatments 

A new tool, developed by US researchers, could help to measure how effectively nanoparticles can deliver drugs to a patient’s cells.
 
Cutting-edge technology means nanoparticles can be used to deliver drugs to very specific areas of the body, but currently, scientists can only see whether the nanoparticle has reached its target cell, not if the contents of the particle have been properly released.
 
A team at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Maryland, USA, used a colour-coded system developed in mouse cells, and tested in live mice, to follow which cells had been exposed to the drug by labelling them with a fluorescent gene which can be tracked around the body.
 
“This [technology] would allow us to develop more precisely delivered therapies, which could improve both efficacy and safety,” said author Dr Jordan Green.

Studying brain cancer using fewer mice 

Scientists at Uppsala University, Sweden, have created a new way to study brain cancer tumours and partly replace the use of mice models with zebrafish. 

In the findings, published in Neuro-Oncology, cancer cells were transplanted from patients into zebrafish embryos, and then artificial intelligence analysed any tumour growth and the progress of treatment. 

Professor Sven Nelander, who led the study, explained that not all cancer cells can grow in mouse models: “We saw that the cells that didn’t grow in zebrafish didn’t grow in mice either. If the method can be used to predict how cells will function in mice, we can reduce the number of mice that are used in other studies.”