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In the 1970s, with the help of electron microscopy, scientists discovered that human RNA can also be circular. However, it was far from clear what this actually meant – and how it might be understood. And up to a few short years ago, it was widely assumed in scientific circles […]

The discovery of the UM171 molecule, by Dr. Guy Sauvageau and Anne Marinier, made headlines in 2014 following an article in Science. Hailed by some as a revolution, even a miracle, in the field of blood stem cell transplantation, the UM171 molecule is delivering on its promise. After the two-year clinical […]

With CAR T cell therapy, a patient’s own immune cells are genetically modified and inserted back into the body to find and kill cancer. This form of immunotherapy has already revolutionized some cancer treatments, but once the CAR T cells are inside a patient, where do they go? How do […]

Given the amount of wear and tear it’s subjected to on a daily basis, the skin has a phenomenal ability to replenish itself. Spread throughout it are small reservoirs of stem cells, nested within supportive microenvironments called niches, which keep a tight rein on this repair process. Too much tissue […]

Studying mice, scientists have shown that boosting the activity of specific immune cells in the heart after a heart attack can protect against developing heart failure, an invariably fatal condition. Patients with heart failure tire easily and become breathless from everyday activities because the heart muscle has lost the ability […]

As we age, our bodies tend to develop diseases such as heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes, and the presence of anyone disease increases the risk of developing others. A drug usually targets only one condition, largely ignoring the interconnectedness of age-related diseases and requiring patients to take multiple drugs, […]

Signs of frailty and the risks it brings could be identified in young and old people alike through a new assessment developed in a study by researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Yale. Increasing the risk of frailty is a defining characteristic of the aging process […]

Synthetic molecules made at Berkeley Lab can be used to diagnose numerous devastating illnesses. There are currently no effective treatments for prion diseases, a family of fatal neurodegenerative conditions caused by accumulations of misfolded copies of a naturally occurring protein. But now, there is finally an effective way to test […]

Researchers Lorenzo Pasquali and Mireia Ramos-Rodríguez have published recently in Nature Genetics the results of a study on the mechanisms that cause an inflammatory response to trigger pancreatic beta-cell death, leading to the onset of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). L. Pasquali is a Ramon y Cajal researcher at the Josep […]

People who have a certain type of bacteria in their guts may be at greater risk of developing bowel cancer. The findings will be presented by the University of Bristol researcher, Dr. Kaitlin Wade, at the 2019 NCRI Cancer Conference in Glasgow. While there is increasing evidence that the make-up […]

The development of a set of strategies for delivering genome editing complexes directly to stem cells has earned a group of innovators at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine a first-year grant of nearly $700,000 through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Somatic Cell Genome Editing Program. The work […]

Can scrambled eggs unscramble themselves? Well, sort of. The cytoplasm of ruptured Xenopus frog eggs spontaneously reorganizes into cell-like compartments, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “We were gobsmacked,” said James Ferrell, MD, Ph.D., professor of chemical and systems biology and of biochemistry. “If you blend a […]

Defying the odds, an individual at high risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease remained dementia-free for many years beyond what was anticipated. A study funded in part by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, led researchers to suggest that a gene variant may be […]

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have made a major breakthrough in the field of cell signaling. In humans, signaling in cells normally regulates cell growth and repair. However, abnormal cell signaling contributes to many diseases, including cancer and neurodegeneration. Therefore, identifying specific proteins that control cell signaling in health […]

A protein that breast, lung and other cancers use to promote their spread – or metastasis – to the brain, has been identified by a team led by Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators. The protein, CEMIP, will now be a focus of efforts to predict, prevent and treat brain […]

MIT engineers have shown that they can enhance the performance of drug-delivery nanoparticles by controlling a trait of chemical structures known as chirality — the “handedness” of the structure. Many biological molecules can come in either right-handed or left-handed forms, which are identical in composition but are mirror images of […]

NK cells mean Natural Killer cells. They are part of the innate immune system. They are known primarily for their ability to recognize and kill tumor cells, cells infected by viruses and bacteria, or dying by apoptosis. Although evidence about their antitumoral capacity, how this activity occurred remained unknown. The […]

A blood test that measures the amount of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in the bloodstream – called a liquid biopsy – correlates with how patients will progress after they are diagnosed with glioblastoma (GBM), the deadliest and most common primary brain tumor in adults. In a new study, researchers from the Abramson […]

There is, in Colombia, a family with a tragic legacy of forgetfulness. “People in this large family get Alzheimer’s like clockwork at age 45-50,” said UC Santa Barbara neuroscientist Kenneth S. Kosik, the campus’s Harriman Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Neuroscience Research Institute. Their aggressive, genetic form of the […]

Researchers have found a way to create a super-inhibitor that effectively stops the development of Parkinsons by using the Parkinson disease itself as an active building block. Various neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s are closely linked to the aggregation of individual components called monomers of a specific protein that forms […]

Inserted in the human genome thousands of years ago, the genes can produce viral proteins without activating the whole virus. Genes from a virus that was stitched into the human genome thousands of years ago are active, producing proteins in the human brain and other tissues, according to researchers at […]

A modified protein in benign-appearing meningiomas can reveal which are truly benign and which are more dangerous and require more aggressive treatment, researchers have discovered. The finding may also offer clues as to why these ‘benign’ tumors, which arise from the membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord, start […]

The checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) increases the survival time of patients with advanced head and neck cancers, according to a new global study led by Yale Cancer Center (YCC). The data was published in the journal The Lancet. The findings of the phase 3 study show that, compared to the standard […]

Two Florida State University researchers are developing a high-tech material currently used in athletic equipment and prosthetics into a special tool to better develop stem cells. The work could improve drug screening, disease modeling, precision medicine, and cell therapy. FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers Yan Li, an associate professor in […]

Computational scientists, biophysicists and statisticians from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are leading a massive multi-institutional collaboration that has developed a machine learning-based simulation for next-generation supercomputers capable of modeling protein interactions and mutations that play a role in many forms of cancer. The […]

Sandia scientist pushes technology’s limits to see fundamental feature of stretched S-DNA. An advanced imaging technique reveals new structural details of S-DNA, ladder-like DNA that forms when the molecule experiences extreme tension. This work conducted at Sandia National Laboratories and Vrije University in the Netherlands provides the first experimental evidence […]

Do you know how many people in the world suffer from diabetes? About 422, according to World Health Organization, but we can’t know for certain. The issue here is that many people who are suffering from diabetes live without diagnosis. This is a huge problem, but scientists think that one […]

Researchers reveal structures of skeletal components in hair-like cilia. It’s not every day that scientists get to publish a paper on Halloween about a skeleton, but that’s what the laboratories of Alan Brown in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and Rui Zhang at Washington University in St. Louis just did. As reported […]

Finding a handful of cancer cells hiding among billions of blood cells in a patient sample can be like finding a needle in a haystack. In a new approach enabled by 3D-printed cell traps, researchers are removing the hay to expose the cancer cells. Trapping the white blood cells – […]

Between 2005 and 2015, as the opioid crisis in America came into focus, prescriptions for gabapentinoid medications — gabapentin and pregabalin — to adults with cancer saw a two-fold increase, a University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center study has found. Gabapentin, which affects voltage-gated calcium channels in the brain, was originally approved […]