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Harvard Medical School

May 20, 2005

CELL BIOLOGY: Broken Hearts May Mend After All
Adult cardiac muscle cells refuse to divide and renew after injury from heart failure, the primary cause of death in the developed world. But in the May 15 issue of Genes and Development, a team led by Mark T. Keating (on right) and Felix Engel announces that it has accomplished a long-sought goal: coaxing adult mammalian cardiomyocytes to divide and proliferate. Their achievement is a first step in trying to accomplish the same feat in a living animal and suggests a molecular pathway for repairing a damaged heart after injury.

NEUROSCIENCE: Breathing Restored After Severe Spinal-cord Injury
The grim link between spinal-cord injury and paralysis looms in most people’s minds. Yet when an accident occurs, moving is often one of the last things patients and their doctors worry about. Breathing is usually the first. Two years ago, Yang Teng (right) and his colleagues found that they could temporarily restore breathing in rats with lower spinal-cord injuries by administering a common drug, buspirone. In recent work, Howard Choi, Teng, and colleagues developed a rat model with higher-level spinal-cord injury. Even in these more seriously injured animals, the researchers found that buspirone restored breathing. The findings appear in the May 4 Journal of Neuroscience.

IMMUNOLOGY: Insulin Prods Development of Type 1 Diabetes
Type 1 diabetes occurs when most of the insulin-making islet cells in the pancreas have been attacked by a person’s own aberrant immune cells. The loss of insulin, which regulates blood sugar, leads to the serious consequences of the disease. Of the several pancreatic proteins that may be objects of such an assault, insulin now seems to be the key target of the initial attack, report David Hafler, Sally Kent, and colleagues in the May 12 Nature. As such, it is a crucial trigger of type 1 diabetes. These and related findings will likely stimulate development of therapies to suppress the autoimmune response to insulin antigens for preventing and treating the disease.