Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have revealed a previously overlooked layer of genetic variation that could help explain why people experience disease differently, and why some treatments work better for certain populations.
Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have identified an early step in a cellular process that leads to inflammation in fat cells and may result in type 2 diabetes in people with obesity.
New approach could be applied to other complex, genetically influenced diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s
Four University of Rhode Island researchers have developed and tested a cost-effective, easy-to-use tabletop device that can generate pressure waves, mimicking the impact of blasts that can cause neurodegeneration. Their study was recently published in the journal Cell Reports Methods. The results will help URI’s Claudia Fallini and Riccardo Sirtori better study the development and progression of neurodegenerative diseases in their lab.
Rice University bioengineers have demonstrated a nonsurgical way to quiet a seizure-relevant brain circuit in an animal model. The team used low-intensity focused ultrasound to briefly open the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in the hippocampus, delivered an engineered gene therapy only to that region and later flipped an on-demand “dimmer switch” with an oral drug.
“This is really unprecedented. A single treatment that simultaneously lowered LDL cholesterol and triglycerides,” said Luke J. Laffin, M.D., lead study author and a preventive cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic
An Osaka Metropolitan University team has used stem cells extracted from adipose, the body’s fatty tissue, to treat spine fractures in rats similar to those caused by osteoporosis in humans. These cells offer the advantages of being easy to collect, even from elderly individuals, and causing little stress to the body, suggesting a noninvasive way of treating bone diseases.
The pursuit of a longer life may currently be trending for tech bros, but the notion of a fountain of youth, or even immortality, has intrigued people for millennia. Yet, some of the more evidence-based methods to increase longevity, such as dieting, are decidedly unpleasant to maintain over time.
The human genome is riddled with relics of viral infections—bits of DNA from viruses that have been inserted in human DNA over millions of years and never left. Most are silent but some have taken on functional roles, particularly in organs that evolve relatively rapidly, including the placenta.
A poorly characterized protein, historically thought to be a chaperon or enzyme, may actually be a key player in prostate cancer. In a systematic CRISPR screen, scientists from Arc Institute, UCSF, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have identified PTGES3, known as the third prostaglandin E synthase protein, as an unexpected regulator of the androgen receptor.