Puberty, that awkward phase when boys and girls are primed for their sexual reproductive years as men and women, appears to be triggered by the brain's own version of "It takes two to tango," whereby a signal literally gets turned on by a molecule that is produced by a gene aptly named KiSS-1.

The couple – a biochemical equivalent to Adam and Eve – makes its sudden appearance in a region of the brain called the hypothalamus just as puberty begins, according to a study published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In a development that could one day score a touchdown for better health, chemists in Australia have created a "superbowl" molecule that shows promise for precision drug delivery, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Shaped like a miniature football stadium, the molecule is capable of delivering a wide range of drugs — from painkillers to chemotherapy cocktails — to specific areas of the body, potentially resulting in improved treatment outcomes and perhaps saving lives, the researchers say.

University of Michigan researchers have developed a faster, more efficient way to produce a wide variety of nanoparticle drug delivery systems, using DNA molecules to bind the particles together.

Nanometer-scaled dendrimers can be assembled in many configurations by using attached lengths of single-stranded DNA molecules, which naturally bind to other DNA strands in a highly specific fashion.

"With this approach, you can target a wide variety of molecules---drugs, contrast agents---to almost any cell," said Dr. James R. Baker Jr., the Ruth Dow Doan Professor of Nanotechnology and director of the Center for Biologic Nanotechnology at U-M.

Whether a bioartificial kidney containing billions of donor kidney cells will help intensive care patients with kidney failure survive is under study at the Medical College of Georgia.

MCG Medical Center has joined a study taking place in intensive care units across the country to evaluate the efficacy of the renal assist device, says Dr. Harold M. Szerlip, MCG nephrologist specializing in acute renal failure and a principal investigator on the study.

"If you have renal failure in the ICU, your mortality is extremely high," Dr. Szerlip says. "Anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of those patients die and over the past 20 years, despite dialysis, that has not changed much."

A small sequence of DNA in the envelope (Env) protein of a mouse breast tumor virus (called MMTV) can transform breast cells into cancer cells, according to a study by Katz et al. in the February 7 issue of The Journal of Experimental Medicine. The ability of this motif to transform cells single-handedly suggests that viral infection may be an important and previously unrecognized trigger for breast cancer.

After years of trial and error, scientists have coaxed human embryonic stem cells to become spinal motor neurons, critical nervous system pathways that relay messages from the brain to the rest of the body.

The new findings, reported online today (Jan. 30, 2005) in the journal Nature Biotechnology by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are important because they provide critical guideposts for scientists trying to repair damaged or diseased nervous systems.

Activists hope this weekend's African Union (AU) summit will net commitments to boost government spending on public health, helping to curb the spread of AIDS, which killed 2.3 million Africans in 2004.

"We are definitely optimistic that this time there will be some movement, that this time there will be not just talk about an HIV strategy for the AU but how to tackle an action-oriented plan," Oxfam spokeswoman Shehnilla Mohamed said.

"Governments are learning that fighting AIDS is not just a health issue but a development issue," she said.

Contrary to the results of a recent U.S. study, investigators in Japan found no association between a herpesvirus infection and a potentially life-threatening form of high blood pressure, as reported in the March 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

The researchers reported that they were not able to detect human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8), also known as the Kaposi's sarcoma virus, in the lungs of 22 patients with primary or other forms of pulmonary hypertension. These observations, by Harutaka Katano and colleagues from Toho University School of Medicine and the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo, Japan, contrast with those in a much-publicized 2003 article published in The New England Journal of Medicine that reported the presence of the virus in similar samples of lung tissue from a similar number of patients.

In the most detailed large-scale study to date of the proteins that package DNA, researchers have mapped a family of switches that turn genes on and off. Their findings may help scientists understand regulatory mechanisms underlying cancer and human development.

The research team includes first author Bradley Bernstein, recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) physician postdoctoral fellowship who works in the Harvard University laboratory of HHMI investigator Stuart L. Schreiber. Other co-authors are from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Affymetrix. Their findings are published in the January 28, 2005 issue of Cell.

For patients with high-risk breast cancer treated with radical mastectomy and adjuvant chemotherapy, the addition of radiation therapy leads to better survival outcomes with few long-term toxic effects, according to a 20-year follow-up of a randomized trial, which appears in the January 19 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The British Columbia randomized radiation therapy trial was designed to determine the effect on survival of the addition of locoregional radiation therapy (radiation to the lymph nodes and chest wall) to a course of chemotherapy after radical mastectomy in premenopausal women with lymph node–positive breast cancer. Between 1979 and 1986, 318 patients were randomly assigned to receive no radiation therapy or to receive radiation. A 15-year follow-up found that radiation therapy was associated with improved breast cancer survival but not with overall survival.