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Published on August 8, 2016
In contrast to the general belief that the airways of an infant are sterile until after birth, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) researchers and colleagues have found that the infant airway is already colonized with bacteria or bacterial DNA when a baby is born. This is true for infants…
Published on July 11, 2016
The NIH recently award $55 million to support projects of the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) to further build out the research and data infrastructure needed to recruit the 1-million person research cohort targeted for the project. Separately, the FDA issued two draft guidance documents aimed at providing a framework for…
Published on July 7, 2016
A team of researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, along with colleagues at seven other world-leading cancer centers in the US, utilized a simple saliva test to analyze DNA of patients with advanced prostate cancer. The new study, “Inherited DNA-Repair Gene…
Published on June 1, 2016
Increased global travel, climate change, and changes in lifestyle have contributed to the evolution of viruses endemic to tropical and sub-tropical global areas into world-traveling pathogens. And experts say the relatively recent emergence of Ebola virus, Nipah virus, Sin Nombre Hantavirus, SARS, Influenza viruses (H1N1, H7N9), and MERS viruses “clearly…
Published on May 2, 2016
DNA→RNA→Protein. This flow of genetic information has been the framework of modern biology since it was first enunciated by Francis Crick in 1958. However, in recent years researchers have begun to assemble a more comprehensive picture surrounding the “central dogma” of molecular biology, leading to the revelation that RNA is…
Published on April 29, 2016
In a new study lead by scientists at the University of Minnesota and Nantes University Hospital in France, researchers showed that the bacteria in a patient’s gut might predict their risk for life-threatening blood infections following high-dose chemotherapy. Approximately 20,000 cancer patients receive high-dose chemotherapy each year in preparation for…
Published on March 25, 2016
Scientists at University of Oxford and the Evandro Chagas Institute in Brazil have reported on the sequencing of seven Zika virus (ZIKV) genomes from the recent South American outbreak, including one fatal adult case and one newborn with microcephaly. This data offers new information on how and when the virus…
Published on March 22, 2016
It’s not an either/or situation. Both DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing hold clinical promise—diagnostically, prognostically, and therapeutically. It must be said, however, that RNA sequencing reflects the dynamic nature of gene expression, shifting with the vagaries of health and disease. Also, RNA sequencing captures more biochemical complexity, in the sense…
Published on March 15, 2016
A new collaborative study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has not only helped to restructure the taxonomy of kidney cancer, it has also uncovered some new actionable therapeutic targets. The new study was a comprehensive molecular analysis of almost 900 kidney cancer cases that found substantial molecular…
Published on March 9, 2016
It’s a first—a study that tracks antimicrobial use and resistance through the entire beef production process. And it has surprising results. First, an examination of samples from 1741 cattle yielded no resistance genes. Second, an examination of environmental samples from cattle pens revealed the presence of genes that confer resistance…
Published on March 4, 2016
For all its genetic diversity, a tumor may yet display some common elements, antigens that reflect the tumor’s early mutational history. If these common elements could be identified, they could be used to target practically all of the tumor’s cells for destruction, and not just tumor cells that happen to…
Published on February 23, 2016
Lipidomics, the large-scale analysis of cellular lipids, is not only enriching the discipline of systems biology, it is also contributing to the development of new biomarkers. Yet for all the structural and mechanistic insights it is capable of providing, lipidomics continues to struggle with a blind spot. It has trouble…
Published on January 5, 2016
While the heterogeneity of influenza A infections has been understood for some time, the impact of minor strains on overall infection and transmission rates has been underappreciated. Now, a team of researchers led by scientists at New York University’s College of Global Public Health has discovered evidence strongly suggesting that…
Published on October 15, 2015
Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have harnessed the power of next-generation sequencing to analyze a large collection of leukemia tissue samples. Using whole exome sequencing (WES), the investigators screened genetic material from more than 500 samples of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)…
Published on May 1, 2015
Cancer researchers and drug developers continue to say that although gene expression profiling has led to significant advances in cancer diagnosis and prognosis, in vivo animal models that allow translation of therapeutic strategies to the clinic are sorely needed. Used in research since the 1980s, xenograft models (PDX models) or…