Award honors fundamental research that is expected to be of considerable significance for medicine IMAGE:This is professor Emmanuelle Charpentier, recipient of the Louis-Jeantet-Prize for Medicine 2015. view more Credit: Helmholtz / Hallbauer&Fioretti Prof Emmanuelle Charpentier from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig is one of the two recipients of the 2015 Louis-Jeantet-Prize for Medicine. The prize money of 700,000 Swiss francs is mostly attributed for the continuation of the awardees work. Charpentier receives the prize for harnessing an ancient immune defense system in bacteria - CRISPR-Cas9 - into a genome editing tool largely exploited by biologists and promising for curing human diseases. Bacterial pathogens also possess an immune system that defends them against predators, and particularly viruses. When studying this system, Charpentier while she was a group leader at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) at Ume University and her team unravelled a unique mechanism - CRISPR-Cas9 - a pair of molecular scissors composed of a duplex of two RNAs linked to a protein. In collaboration with the team of her colleague Prof Jennifer Doudna, University of California, Berkeley, it was demonstrated that the mechanism could be harnessed into a powerful tool for genome engineering. … Continue reading →

IMAGE:Bryan Luikart, an assistant professor of Physiology and Neurobiology in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, leads a research team investigating the neurobiological basis of autism spectrum disorders. view more Credit: Dartmouth College HANOVER, N.H. - Recent research has linked autism with a lack of "pruning" in developing brain connections, but a new Dartmouth study suggests instead it is the excessive growth of new connections that causes sensory overload in people with the disorder. The results, which have broad implications for understanding the neurobiological basis of autism spectrum disorders, appear in The Journal of Neuroscience. A PDF of the study is available on request. "We've been working on understanding how dysfunction of the gene Pten, which is known to cause some cases of autism, effects neuronal development, and I believe our findings represent the best understanding in science today for how an autism candidate gene changes the functional characteristics of developing neurons," says senior author Bryan Luikart, an assistant professor of Physiology and Neurobiology in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Mutations in the gene Pten are among the most common single-gene mutations that cause autism and a group of interrelated syndromes. People with these diseases have increased … Continue reading →

Stem Cell Therapy | Recent Strides Quell Stem Cell Debate Ethical concerns for stem cells for arthritis could be mute...maybe. Reports show that adult stem cells (Autologous) have been shown in recent studies to have significant effects on osteoarthritis... By: Nathan Wei … Continue reading →

Results from a preliminary study indicate that among patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS), treatment with nonmyeloablative hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (low intensity stem cell transplantation) was associated with improvement in measures of disability and quality of life, according to a study in the January 20 issue of JAMA. Fifty percent of patients with MS are unable to continue employment by 10 years from diagnosis or are unable to walk by 25 years. Despite an annual cost of approximately $47,000 per patient to treat MS, no therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been shown to significantly reverse neurological disability or improve quality of life, according to background information in the article. Multiple sclerosis is thought to be an immunemediated disorder of the central nervous system. Autologous (the use of one's own cells) hematopoietic (blood) stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a form of immune suppression but unlike standard immune-based drugs, autologous HSCT is designed to reset rather than suppress the immune system. Richard K. Burt, M.D., of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, and colleagues studied the association of nonmyeloablative HSCT with neurological disability and other clinical outcomes in patients with relapsing-remitting MS (defined as … Continue reading →