Connecting You to Tomorrow's Biotechnology Innovations
The amoeba Naegleria fowleri is commonly found in warm swimming pools, lakes and rivers. On rare occasions, the amoeba can infect a healthy person and cause severe primary amebic meningoencephalitis, a “brain-eating” disease that is almost always fatal. Other than trial-and-error with general antifungal medications, there are no treatments for the infection. Researchers at Skaggs […]
Researchers at Iowa State University have gained new insight into how the parasitic protozoa that cause malaria hijack human red blood cells, a development with the potential to lead to new ways to treat the disease. The parasites that cause malaria symptoms in humans enter the red blood cells of a host and quickly rearrange […]
Researchers report in Nature Communications they figured out why air sacs in the lungs clog up with a thick substance called surfactant in a brutal disease called Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis (PAP), and they show taking cholesterol-busting pills called statins can effectively treat the disease. That’s good news for people with PAP because at present the […]
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found a nanobody that holds promise to advance targeted therapies for a number of neurological diseases and cancer. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, Sahil Gulati, of the Department of Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and colleagues identified a nanobody derived […]
McMaster University researchers have developed a new theory on Huntington’s disease which is being welcomed for showing promise to open new avenues of drug development for the condition. Huntington’s disease is caused by a mutation in the gene that makes the protein called huntingtin. A team of researchers led by McMaster has found there is […]
Researchers used an experimental molecular therapy in preclinical laboratory tests to effectively treat several types of deadly pediatric brain cancer and now propose advancing the treatment to clinical testing in children. Scientists at the Cincinnati Children’s Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute report in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics testing the small molecule 6-thio-2’deoxyguanosine (6-thio-dG) in […]
By April, nearly one-third of the U.S. is already experiencing high pollen levels while the weather and temperatures continue to fluctuate, aggravating sinus symptoms. A patient’s mucus may predict the type of his or her chronic sinusitis, which could help doctors determine whether surgery or medical treatments can produce the best outcomes, according to a […]
Diabetic retinopathy is considered one of the most disabling complications of diabetes and the leading cause of new cases of vision loss among adults. A new Michigan State University study is the first to find that a particular type of lipid, or fat, thought to only exist in the skin, now lives in your eye […]
A common cold virus engineered to attack the most common and deadly of brain tumors allowed 20 percent of patients with recurrent glioblastoma to live for three years or longer, researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report on a phase I clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The altered […]
Indiana University researchers have made an important step forward in the design of drugs that fight the hepatitis B virus, which can cause liver failure and liver cancer. It’s estimated that 2 billion people worldwide have had a hepatitis B virus infection in their lifetime, with about 250 million — including 2 million Americans — […]
In a study of 61 people treated for the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Johns Hopkins researchers conclude that fatigue, pain, insomnia and depression do indeed persist over long periods of time for some people, despite largely normal physical exams and clinical laboratory testing. “Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS) is a real disorder that causes […]
Researchers with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) report that an experimental heroin vaccine induced antibodies that prevented the drug from crossing the blood-brain barrier in mice and rats. The vaccine was co-developed at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes […]
Blood-Based Cancer Tests Reveal Complex Genomic Landscape of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancers A new UC San Francisco–led study challenges the dogma in oncology that most cancers are caused by one dominant “driver” mutation that can be treated in isolation with a single targeted drug. Instead, the new research finds one of the world’s most deadly […]
Researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) and the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) have discovered that a critical protein, known as interleukin 11 (IL11) is responsible for fibrosis and causes organ damage. While it is surprising that the importance of IL11 has been overlooked and misunderstood for so long, it has now been very clearly […]
Michael Pulsipher, MD, of the Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, along with Michael Keller, MD from Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, have been awarded $4.8 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to study the use of a new T-cell therapy to help fight […]
Precision medicine clinical trial leads to approval of first treatment for Erdheim-Chester disease The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it has approved the drug vemurafenib for the treatment of patients with BRAF V600-mutant Erdheim-Chester disease (ECD). This is the first approval of a targeted therapy based on a basket study and […]
Breast cancer researchers have mapped early genetic alterations in normal-looking cells at various distances from primary tumours to show how changes along the lining of mammary ducts can lead to disease. The findings of the multidisciplinary team of surgeons, pathologists and scientists led by principal investigator Dr. Susan Done are published online today in Nature […]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it has awarded 15 new clinical trial research grants totaling more than $22 million over the next four years to boost the development of products for patients with rare diseases. These new grants were awarded to principal investigators from academia and industry across the country. “Given […]
Individuals with certain types of bacteria in their gut may be more likely to respond well to cancer immunotherapy, researchers at the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center found in a study of patients with metastatic melanoma. The incidence of melanoma has been increasing over the past 40 years. Immunotherapies have dramatically improved the outlook […]
Checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapy has been shown to be very effective in recurrent and metastatic head and neck cancer but only in a minority of patients. University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers may have found a way to double down on immunotherapy’s effectiveness. In a paper published in the journal JCI Insights on […]