A study published last week showed how the eye protects itself from inflammatory damage – and how, when this process doesn't work well, disease can result.
One of the goals of regenerative medicine is to provide patients with autologous cell transplants to replace their own failing cells. The way to get such cells is to first make patient-specific stem cells. And one way to make such stem cells is to reprogram an egg with the hypothetical patient's own DNA.
It is, of course, no great feat to predict that hepatitis C will be an important topic at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), which will take place in San Francisco in early November. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that nearly 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, meaning that the virus is rivaled only by alcoholic liver disease as a cause of liver problems.
It seems likely that this year’s Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine will be remembered by many people who normally forget about it before the physics prize is even announced. One of the three prize winners, Ralph Steinman, passed away last Friday. The Nobel Prizes are not usually awarded posthumously; the Nobel Prize website, in fact, states that such awards are “not possible,” and so it is unclear whether Steinman is, indeed, a Nobelist or not. According to a report by the Associated Press, committee members didn't know Steinman was dead when they chose him as a winner and are...
Monoclonal antibodies are big business. According to a report published by Deloitte, global sales of just the top 10 monoclonal antibodies amounted to $3.6 billion in 2009. That report asserted that "monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have become one of the most valuable and rapidly growing segments of the worldwide pharmaceutical industry."
A frequent challenge for drug developers is how to target drugs – especially cancer drug, which aim to kill their target cells – to the right cell population. But researchers at Johns Hopkins University have turned this problem on its ear: Instead of delivering drugs specifically to cancer cells, they have developed a way to make cancer cells activate prodrugs through use of molecular switches.
What did the productive procrastinator say to the beetle on the beer bottle? “Oh, you won an Ig Nobel Prize, too!” That’s right. One of my favorite parts of the science awards season has arrived: Yesterday, another crop of Ig Nobel winners was announced. This year’s crop of Ig Nobel-worthy findings included the fact that yawning is not contagious in turtles; that the best way to procrastinate on something important is to avoid it by doing something else that is also important; and that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an...
Researchers have identified an unexpected second role for a key protein that normally plays a role in cell division, in cells whose dividing days are long behind them. The cell cycle protein cyclin E is expressed in neurons at high levels, and plays a role in memory formation.
One of the biggest challenges of RNA interference remains its delivery. Getting siRNA into the cells where it's needed has been challenging on several fronts. For one thing, RNA is not the most stable molecule. For another, even when it is stable, how to get it into specific cells has been something of a head-scratcher.
