by Queen Mary, University of London A gene has been discovered that can naturally suppress the signs of Alzheimer’s Disease in human brain cells, in research led by Queen Mary University of London. The scientists have also developed a new rapid drug-screening system for treatments that could potentially delay or prevent the disease. The main...
by Tom Ulrich, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths, killing more per year than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined. Over the years, studies of the lung cancer genome have fueled the development of drug therapies that target mutations...
by Cornell University Across the globe, approximately 50 million people are living with dementia. The two most common forms are Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which develop when neurons in specific parts of the brain stop functioning—triggering memory loss and other behavioral or personality changes. Without a cure, the World Health Organization predicts...
by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia A team of researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) used a new method of pinpointing potential disease-causing changes in the genome to identify two new potential therapeutic targets for lupus, while also paving the way for more accurately identifying disease-causing variations in other autoimmune disorders. The findings were published...
by Sheila Evans, University of Chicago Medical Center Many heritable immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and blood-cell related traits derive from critical proteins not being made or not functioning correctly. But exactly how a person’s genes, the regulation of these genes and how the resulting proteins interact to cause disease is not widely understood....
by La Jolla Institute for Immunology Flashback to mid-March: the novel coronavirus had reached San Diego, California. Few people could get tested, and even less was known about how the virus mutated as it spread from person to person. Scientists now know that two variants of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) were circulating at that time....
Genomics carries great expectations: the power to help health-care providers assess and assist their patients in managing their individualized risks for common, serious medical conditions, such as cancer and heart disease. However, how to effectively meld genetic risk assessments into health care is a complex question. Several medical research institutions across the nation, including UW...
by Delthia Ricks , Medical Xpress Many rheumatic conditions develop slowly and initially have inflammatory arthritis as the first sign that something is amiss. The trouble with such close similarity is the difficulty that clinicians have differentiating one condition from another in the early stages of the disease process. Dr. Rachel Knevel and colleagues at...
By Heidi Ledford, Nature magazine on June 25, 2020 A suite of experiments that use the gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9 to modify human embryos have revealed how the process can make large, unwanted changes to the genome at or near the target site. The studies were published this month on the preprint server bioRxiv, and have...
After examining the genes of more than 200,000 people all over the world who have type-2 diabetes, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center (CMCVAMC) found hundreds of genetic variants never before linked to the disease....
