Peptide aptamers are small, artificial polypeptides, which bind to target proteins in a highly specific manner, similar to antibodies. These proteins can occur naturally or they may be artificially created. What are Aptamers? Aptamers were first used in research following their discovery in the 1990’s when Tuerk and Gold developed a methodology to select for...
Post
Study could help explain how childhood stress contributes to anxiety, depression
SAN DIEGO – New research could help explain why stress early in life can create vulnerabilities to mood and anxiety disorders later on. The study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University, was presented Nov. 5 in San Diego at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, and highlights the important role of mast cells....
Post
Regeneration in the digestive tract
The human gut is teeming with billions of beneficial bacteria. Therapies that use antibiotics often destroy most of them. Whether and how the intestinal flora will subsequently recover has been investigated by a research team that included scientists from the MDC. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology. IMAGE: THIS IS A...
Post
First-in-class YEATS inhibitors that show promise for leukemia treatment
A research team led by Dr. Xiang David Li from the Department of Chemistry at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with scientists from Tsinghua University in China, The Rockefeller University, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in the United States, developed the first chemical inhibitors against a novel therapeutic...
Post
Pathway to resolve allergic asthma is discovered
A group of Brazilian researchers succeeded in preventing allergic asthma from progressing in experimental models by increasing the amount of a protein. This increase, in turn, blocked the CD4+ T lymphocytes responsible for producing a cytokine that triggers a cascade of events resulting in the onset and progression of the disease. This knowledge of how...
Post
Dana-Farber scientists find new drug targets in aggressive cancers
BOSTON – Scientists have discovered a previously unknown molecular vulnerability in two rare, aggressive, and hard-to-treat types of cancer, and say it may be possible to attack this weakness with targeted drugs. Reporting in Nature Cell Biology, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute show that these two cancers – synovial sarcoma and malignant rhabdoid tumors –...
Post
Team studying rare disorder discovers novel way to target melanoma
While studying a rare genetic disorder called NGLY1 deficiency, University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) researchers discovered a new targeted treatment for combating melanoma, a skin cancer that kills about 9,000 people in the United States each year. IMAGE: THIS IS YU-CHIEH WANG, PH.D., AND VICTOR LIN, MS, UNT SYSTEM COLLEGE OF PHARMACY, UNT...
Post
Stanford chemists develop a new way to treat antibiotic-resistant infections
With drug-resistant infections on the rise and the development of new antibiotics on the decline, the world could use a new strategy in the fight against increasingly wily bacteria. Now, Stanford chemists report November 2 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society a possible solution: a small molecular attachment that helps conventional antibiotics penetrate...
Post
New gene therapy reprograms brain glial cells into neurons
A new gene therapy can turn certain brain glial cells into functioning neurons, which in turn could help repair the brain after a stroke or during neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases. In a series of studies in animals, a team of Penn State researchers led by Dr. Gong Chen developed a new gene...
Post
Study points to novel epigenetic target for Alzheimer’s Disease
A research team at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Center for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) has identified a novel epigenetic drug target to simultaneously normalize multiple deficits in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia in the elderly and the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the...