Endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels, have been increasingly recognized as playing important roles in the health and regeneration of the organs their blood vessels supply. A 2010 study showed they were critical for liver regeneration after injury.
Variants in the ApoE gene are the strongest genetic risk factor there is for developing Alzheimer’s disease. Inheriting the E2 allele decreases the number of plaques, while inheriting the E4 allele increases the number of plaques and raises the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease – for those unlucky individuals who have two copies, that risk jumps by 12-fold. E4 carriers also start developing the disease decades earlier than those with E2 alleles.
Two separate teams of researchers have discovered yet another way in which gut bacteria influence the health of their hosts. In mice, such bacteria played a role in the response to three separate types of cancer therapy. Germ-free mice or those treated with antibiotics had weaker responses to an experimental immunotherapy, platinum chemotherapy and cyclophosphamide, which both promotes immunogenic cell death and affects the balance of different T-cell types.
Scientists have shown that inhibiting mTOR more than doubled the life expectancy of mice with Leigh syndrome, a disease that is most often fatal in children by the time they reach school age.
By disrupting the interaction between glucokinase and its regulatory protein, scientists at Amgen Inc. have managed to specifically affect high blood sugar levels in mouse models of diabetes, while having no effect on animals with normal blood sugar.
An antibiotic that was once dropped from clinical development because bacteria quite easily develop genetic resistance to it may get a second lease on life – because as part of a combination therapy, it can kill so-called bacterial persisters in biofilms.
To be of any use at all, scientific experiments need to be reproducible. And it has become increasingly clear over the past few years that far too many of them aren’t.
By reactivating a gene that is normally active in embryonic and fetal tissues, but largely silent after birth, researchers have managed to improve the abilities of some adult tissues to grow and repair themselves after injury.
When the abstracts for the upcoming annual meeting of the American Society for Hematology were released last week, results of Geron Corp.’s Imetelstat were the biggest attention-grabber as far as the market was concerned. (See BioWorld Today, Nov. 8, 2013.)
Abstracts of the data that are to be presented at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting next month were released Thursday. And the biggest market response to trial data involved Geron Corp’s myelofibrosis drug Imetelstat.
