Editor’s note: Since Dr. Breindl first wrote about vaccines and autism in 2008, the paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism has been retracted by the journal that published it, and its author Andrew Wakefield has lost his medical license. But vaccine skepticism is alive and well – and so, during this World Immunization Week, the question remains as pressing as ever: How do you have a productive discussion on policy with people who disagree with you on the facts? I am not a vaccine skeptic. My children have all their required vaccines and some optional ones as well. We...
The immune system's raison d'être is to protect us from invading microbes. But in the intestines, at least, its chances of encountering bad bugs, which necessitate a vigorous response, are, if not exactly as rare as a lightning strike, then nevertheless the exception rather than the rule.
Using nanostructures known as dendrimers to deliver anti-inflammatory drugs across the blood-brain barrier, scientists have been able to improve the symptoms of cerebral palsy in animals. Though still preclinical, that approach, which could also find applications in neurodegenerative diseases, adds cerebral palsy to the growing list of neurodevelopmental disorders that can be at least partially reversed.
Almost 50 percent of drugs that are currently on the market target G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). But Stuart Maudsley, head of the receptor pharmacology unit at the National Institute of Aging's Laboratory of Neurosciences, thinks that medical research has only scratched the surface of their therapeutic possibilities.
Researchers from Sangamo BioSciences Inc. and colleagues from the Italian San Raffaele Biosciences Institute have used Sangamo's zinc finger nuclease technology to create leukemia-fighting T cells. They described their approach in the April 1, 2012, online issue of Nature Medicine, as well as at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation earlier this month.
Scientists from the University of California, Davis, have gained new insights into the initial phase of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which kills about 3 million people a year in the U.S.
By treating mice with an inhibitor of one type of glutamate receptor, scientists from Roche AG have been able to reverse most symptoms of Fragile X disease in young adult animals. The findings add to the evidence that Fragile X, like a number of other neurodevelopmental disorders, remains treatable even after symptoms have developed.
In findings that run directly counter to prevailing wisdom, researchers have found that proinflammatory responses may be protective against the progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the leading cause of blindness in the developed world.
Targeted therapies and immunotherapies are in one sense opposites. Targeted therapies have high response rates and spectacular remissions, but those remissions are all too often short-lived, leading ultimately to a rather slim survival advantage.
