Photo: Wikipedia
Danish Researcher Swallows 600 Intestinal Worm Eggs A researcher from University of Copenhagen has infected himself with hundreds of whipworms for the sake of science. For the past two years he has lived with the 4 to 5-centimeter-long intestinal worms in his bowels. The idea to infect himself with the worms occurred, because Peter Nejsum needed a ‘freshly caught’ worm for genetic analyses of whipworms. Together with international colleagues, he found the whipworms genetics interesting, because the animals are in one way or another able to cheat the human immune system and in this way are allowed to live undisturbed in our intestines. “My immune system can not get rid of the worms. The worms must be cheating the immune system, so that they aren’t recognised as foreign parasites, but are allowed to remain,” tells Peter Nejsum. Test subjects were not queuing up to help and instead Peter Nejsum ended up ordering a stool sample from a whipworm-infected child from Uganda. For three months he stored the eggs while they matured. Then one day he swallowed 600 worm eggs. Today, there are still whipworms in his colon, and the first results of his self-infection have just been published in the Journal of Helminthology.
Photo: Flick’r
Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment: Here are PD-1 Inhibitors A new class of drugs, that enables the body to fight cancer cells, shows again and again promising results in research on humans. The drugs are already approved in the USA and EU for treatment of melanoma and lung cancer. They are called PD-1 inhibitors and work by boosting the body’s natural defence against cancer. One of the drugs that has shown convincing results in the treatment of melanoma cancer is Pembrolizumab. It breaks the bond between a protein (PD-1) on the surface of the body’s T cells and another protein that binds to PD-1 (PD-L1). T cells are the body’s natural defence against cancer, but when PD-L1 is bound to PD-1, it is like putting the breaks on the immune system’s defence. However, when the bond is broken by Pembrolizumab, it is like taking the foot off the break, and the T cells become much more effective against the cancer cells. There are also other forms of immunotherapeutic drugs on the way that either take the immune system’s foot off the break or, so to speak, put its foot on the accelerator.“This is happening after many years wandering in the desert, where there has been very high expectations of immunotherapies. Now something is happening,” says Per Thor Straten, head of the cancer research center, CCIT, at Herlev Hospital.
This page has been compiled in collaboration with Videnskab.dk and ScienceNordic.com.
Myth Debunked: Chromosomes Do Not Decide Your Mortality Danish researchers have rather surprisingly found that short telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes, do not lead to increased mortality. At conception we are given different length telomeres, and these telomeres are worn down as we grow older. However, now researchers behind the new study conclude that the genetic telomere length, i.e. the telomere length we are born with, does not in general play a role in our mortality. Instead, it has shown that in relation to cancer mortality, it is actually an advantage to be born with short telomeres. “We found the opposite of what we expected,” says Stig Bojesen, who explains the lower cancer mortality through genetically short telomeres being because people have long telomeres, because their cells are good at maintaining and repairing them. The disadvantage is that people’s cancer cells are also good at maintaining their telomeres. If one can go in and target the repair process then, in principal, one can better stop cancer,” explains Stig Bojesen.
99