The romantic view of pregnancy is that it is the most precious nine months of a woman's life. A more prosaic view is that it is an autoimmune disease waiting to happen.
I always love reading about the IgNobel Prizes. The stated goal of the prize is to reward research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.” And this year’s crop of winners once again succeeds at those tasks. Take the 2012 Neuroscience IgNobel. It went to a team of scientists “for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere.” The winning study illustrated that using modern measurement methods, which can collect massive amounts of data, without updating statistical methods accordingly will almost inevitably lead to false positives. In their...
While studying premature ovarian aging, a team of scientists has discovered an unexpected connection between BRCA1/2 and FMR1 – genes that are both famous for reasons other than their effects on fertility.
At the 2011 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), outgoing president George Sledge told the audience that while drug developers were becoming smarter than "stupid cancers" – cancers defined and driven largely by a single mutation that could be attacked with targeted therapies – they needed to become smarter than "smart cancers" that are characterized by an overall high mutational load and will quickly mutate their way around any targeted therapy.
Viruses are on the border between living and dead. So are the theories about what some of them cause. Two studies were published last week that showed no link between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and either chronic fatigue syndrome or prostate cancer. The scientific journals consider the matter settled with these studies. In theirs new sections, Nature and PLoS ONE wrote about “the nail in XMRV’s coffin” and “The Final Chapter on XMRV and Prostate Cancer.” Umm . . . good luck with that. Actually, the link between XMRV and prostate cancer may be laid to rest fairly...
There are clinical trials that miss hitting their primary endpoints by that tiny but critical amount that separates 0.051 from 0.049. And then there are clinical trials that tell you unequivocally that there is no there there – no hint of any efficacy whatsoever.
With success rates that are even lower than for many other indications, therapeutics development for neurological disorders can strike fear into the brains of biotech executives.
In findings that, in the opinion of senior author Domenico Accili, turn the current approach to treating Type II diabetes on its head, researchers at Columbia University have discovered that in Type II diabetes, the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells whose failure is at the core of the disease do not die. Quite the opposite: They become more stem cell-like.
Novel analyses of the RV144 HIV vaccine trial, also known as the Thai trial, have analyzed viral variants that were able to get past the protection the vaccine offered. Those results, published in Nature and presented at the AIDS Vaccine 2012 conference this week, add to the emerging understanding that targeting certain parts of HIV's envelope protein is likely the best path to an effective vaccine.
