2021

Cancer starts with mutations in a cell’s DNA, but new UC San Francisco research shows that the endurance of a tumour relies on its ability to rapidly evolve and adapt to challenges brought about by the environment in which it grows. “A major obstacle cancer cells must overcome is their […]

When someone is sick, it’s natural to want to stay as far from them as possible. It turns out this is also true for mice, according to an MIT study that also identified the brain circuit responsible for this distancing behaviour. In a study that explores how otherwise powerful instincts […]

Bipolar disorder affects millions of Americans, causing dramatic swings in mood and, in some people, additional effects such as memory problems. While bipolar disorder is linked to many genes, each one making small contributions to the disease, scientists don’t know just how those genes ultimately give rise to the disorder’s […]

Thousands of different bacterial species live within the human gut. Most are beneficial, while others can be harmful. A new study from an MIT-led team has revealed that these bacterial populations can remake themselves within the lifetime of their host, bypassing genes back and forth. The researchers also showed that […]

In a clinical trial, early treatment with anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) injections slowed diabetic retinopathy, a complication of diabetes that causes damage to the blood vessels of the light-sensitive tissue in the retina. However, two years into the four-year study, the early treatment’s effect on vision – including changes […]

An aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma has no cure. Patients survive an average of 15 months after diagnosis, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving longer than five years. While researchers are investigating potential new therapies via ongoing clinical trials, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis […]

New research from the lab of Marija Drndić showcases a potential new platform for parallel DNA sequencing. Published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, the study uses state-of-the-art fabrication and analytical techniques and demonstrates a path to how solid-state materials can be further developed for high-throughput sequencing. The research was conducted by Drndić, PhD […]

Children and young adults who receive CAR T-cell therapy for the most common childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, suffer remarkably fewer relapses and are far more likely to survive when the treatment is paired with a subsequent stem cell transplant, a new study finds. The research, with an average, follow […]

Difficulty remembering a password or where a car is parked outside a store doesn’t necessarily suggest memory problems. It’s likely that interference is clouding the brain, suggests University of Oregon neuroscientist Brice Kuhl. How do people encode new information and accurately recall it later? That’s the focus of the Kuhl […]

Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids. Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function. However, less is known about how […]

In 2014, two years after her Nobel Prize-winning invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Jennifer Doudna thought the technology was mature enough to tackle a cure for a devastating hereditary disorder, sickle cell disease, that afflicts millions of people around the world, most of them of African descent. Some 100,000 Black […]

A year ago, when the COVID-19 lockdown began, Dr. Rachel Issaka expected that colonoscopies would decline. She was surprised by how much. In the first two months, in-clinic colon cancer screenings fell by 90%.  “I was shocked,” said Issaka, a UW Medicine gastroenterologist and researcher with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. There […]