New test to make gene therapy safer

SAGA detects tumour potential of viral vectors for blood stem cells

09-Jul-2021 - When the causes of serious diseases are based on a defective gene, medicine relies on gene therapy. In this strategy, defect-free genes are introduced into the body with the help of certain viruses. In this way, individual forms of congenital blindness, hereditary muscular atrophy or certain ...

Gene scissors against incurable muscular disease

New gene correction therapy

30-Jan-2020 - Duchenne type muscular dystrophy (DMD) is the most common hereditary muscular disease among children. A Munich based team has developed a gene therapy that may provide permanent relief for those suffering from DMD. LMU researcher Eckhard Wolf was involved in the study. Muscles need dystrophin in ...

New receptor found on scavenger cells

How adenoviruses invade the immune system of mice

28-Aug-2017 - Adenoviral infections have a mild disease progression in healthy people, but it can be dangerous for immunocompromised people. If a patient is infected with the virus and gets a bacterial infection on top of it, it can lead to an excessive inflammatory response known as a cytokine storm, an ...

New biomarker found for group of rare metabolic diseases

09-Aug-2017 - A newly discovered biomarker associated with a rare metabolic disorder may facilitate better diagnosis and identification of new drugs for clinical trials for the disease, according to researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Development of treatments for ...

Genetic mutations that lead to macular degeneration blindness mapped by new research

08-Nov-2016 - Two gene mutations that trigger a retinal disease that causes blindness in one in 5,000 males have been mapped, leading to the potential for new therapeutic treatments. Researchers from The University of Manchester undertook a structural analysis of X-linked Retinoschisis (XLRS), a genetic ...

Rules for gene-therapy vectors

Researchers compute, then combine benign viruses to fight disease

15-Aug-2013 - Rice University researchers are making strides toward a set of rules to custom-design Lego-like viral capsid proteins for gene therapy. A new paper by Rice scientists Junghae Suh and Jonathan Silberg and their students details their use of computational and bioengineering methods to combine ...

A flash of light turns graphene into a biosensor

Disease diagnosis, toxin detection and more are possible with DNA-graphene nanostructure

24-Sep-2009 - Biomedical researchers suspect graphene would be useful in a variety of applications. But no one had studied the interaction between graphene and DNA, the building block of all living things. To learn more, PNNL's Zhiwen Tang, Yuehe Lin and colleagues from both PNNL and Princeton University built ...

Photoactivable bioluminescent probe

23-Jun-2009 - A group of scientists led by Bengang Xing, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in collaboration with Zhen Cheng and colleagues at Stanford University Medical Centre, California, have developed a photoactivable bioluminescent probe for imaging luciferase activity in live cells. ...

Hydrogels provide scaffolding for growth of bone cells

19-Aug-2008 - Hyaluronic hydrogels developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers may provide a suitable scaffolding to enable bone regeneration. The hydrogels, created by Newell Washburn, Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Jeffrey Hollinger, have proven to encourage the growth of preosteoblast cells, cells that ...

Study Offers Clues to Brain's Protective Mechanisms Against Alcoholism

Higher dopamine D2 receptor levels may protect those with family history of addiction

06-Sep-2006 - Why do some people with a strong family history of alcoholism develop alcohol dependency while others do not? A new study provides clues that differing brain chemistry may provide part of the answer. Researchers from four scientific institutions and federal agencies working at the U.S. Department ...