Racial profiling – long in the realm of bad law enforcement – was criticized as bad medicine, too, in a recent paper by scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The reason? As the authors put it, “cosmopolitan cities now include many individuals whose genetic heritage is drawn from multiple continental origins.” In other words, there’s no such thing as racial purity. In their paper, which was published in PLoS ONE and which you can find here (http://ow.ly/4YxK6) the team genotyped nearly 1,000 participants of Biobank, a program that collects DNA and plasma samples to aid in genomic and...
It was a late night for analysts yesterday, as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) released more than 4,000 abstracts in advance of its upcoming annual meeting at 6 pm.
It's a rare paper that is published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under two section headings. And rarer still when those two sections are Genetics and Social Sciences.
One of the supposed advantages of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) – reprogrammed cells with embryonic stem cell-like versatility – is that they can be made from a patient's own skin cells, and so should not provoke an immune response when they are transplanted back into a patient after reprogramming.
Scientists have identified a steroid hormone in the brain – ADIOL, a precursor of both androgen and estrogen – that prevents neuroinflammation by signaling through the estrogen receptor beta on several types of brain support cells.
By using a live viral vector to present HIV antigens in a vaccine, researchers were able to achieve what they termed "profound early control" of SIV infection in rhesus monkeys. SIV is the monkey equivalent of human HIV.
Gilenya (fingolimod, Novartis AG) which the FDA approved in 2010, has shaped the market, as the first oral drug for multiple sclerosis. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 23, 2010.)
Like so many neurological disorders, autism clearly has a genetic component. But the details of those genetics have proven very hard to pin down, partly because – as, indeed, the name "autism spectrum disorder" makes obvious – individuals with a wide spectrum of symptoms ultimately funnel into a diagnosis of autism.
In addition to the familiar stories of drugs that were developed in one indication and found success in another, such as sildenafil and thalidomide, there are regular reports of such repurposing on a smaller scale. Just last week, new data showed HIV drug Viracept (nelfinavir, Pfizer Inc.) chews up some solid tumors as well.
Flow cytometry, which uses fluorescent tags to sort cells one by one according to their properties, is a workhorse of cell biology. But as a sorting technique, flow cytometry tops out at about half a dozen different tags.