Synopsis: Health: Illness: Illness:

"Cellular plasticity may represent an underlying mechanism of disease, as other cellular reprogramming events have been shown in cancers

and metabolic diseases, says Sheng Ding, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, California.

The latest findings could provide clues about how to catch the disease before it does so.

potentially leading to new regenerative treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer s z

#Nanomaterial rivals hardness of diamond An article by Scientific American. It s only a matter of time before a movie villain pulling off the crime of the century needs a cutting tool that is harder than anything else On earth.

But the live viruses in the Sabin vaccine can revert to disease-causing forms especially in populations where immunity is not widespread.

which holds the promise of treatments for a variety of diseases, but which depends on the destruction of days-old human embryos.

from creating organic computers to uniting different parts of the same brain that have been cut off by damage or disease.

The trial demonstrated the folly of assuming that risk factors must have a causal role in disease,

Second sight plans to adapt its technology to someday assist people afflicted with age-related macular degeneration, a similar but more common disease.

"It is hard to think today that one can provide disease surveillance without existing systems, says Alain-Jacques Valleron, an epidemiologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris,

It is also causing more serious illness and deaths than usual, particularly among the elderly,

Traditional flu monitoring depends in part on national networks of physicians who report cases of patients with influenza-like illness (ILI)##a diffuse set of symptoms

overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, includes some 2,

and has been extended to include surveillance for a second disease, dengue. Sources: Google Flu Trends (www. google. org/flutrends;

SLIDESHOW France's Sentinelles'network of doctors reporting cases of influenza-like illness has produced a clear picture of how the 2012-13#flu season has evolved.

Mice with glioblastomas that were treated with TIC10 in combination with bevacizumab#a drug used against diseases including brain tumours

The vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of the disease, and potentially lead to new treatments for polio and other human diseases.

Bryan Charleston, head of the Livestock Viral Diseases Programme at the Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK,

and his colleagues used computer simulations to create a model of the protein shell of the virus that causes the disease,

then reconstructed it from synthetic protein components. The synthetic shell contains no genetic material and so it cannot infect the animals.

it could also be used to create vaccines for human diseases that are caused by viruses of the same family, such as hand, foot and mouth disease,

because we are so close to ending this disease. JEFF J MITCHELL/REUTERSA 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease led to the slaughter of huge numbers of sheep and cows.

whether it could take on the faster-growing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a tenacious disease that kills more than 60%of those afflicted.#

and identify mutations that might be causing the undiagnosed diseases that afflict his clients families.

and finds those most likely to cause disease. Personalis, down the road in Menlo Park, offers sequencing services and interpretation for clinicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

to explore the variants roles in disease. The company will outsource the sequencing to Illumina,

diseases and scavengers#but acknowledge that it might have been caused by behavioural changes, such as the birds learning to avoid cars.

#Distinctive virus behind mystery horse disease For almost 100 years, veterinarians have puzzled over the cause of Theiler's disease,

a mysterious type of equine hepatitis that is linked to blood products and causes liver failure in up to 90%of afflicted animals.

A team of US scientists has discovered now that the disease is caused by a virus that shares just 35%of its amino acid sequences with its closest-known relative.

The team named it Theiler's disease-associated virus (TDAV), and published the discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

California, the team responded to an outbreak of Theiler's disease at a farm in

It is also possible that there is another unknown virus behind Theiler's disease. After all, human hepatitis can be caused by at least five viruses. TDAV belongs to the family Flaviviridae,

and is the first of these to be linked convincingly to disease.""The challenges in culturing pegiviruses mean that we re only now getting an understanding of how widely distributed and significant they are,

and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body. The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university

Bursac group is also trying to grow contracting human muscles using induced pluripotent stem cells instead of biopsied cells. here are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular dystrophy for example,

Historically, these genetic brain diseases were viewed as untreatable. However, in recent years neuroscientists have shown in animal models that it is possible to reverse the debilitating effects of these gene mutations.

and that a treatment developed for one disease produced a cognitive benefit in the other. The research was performed by postdoc and lead author Di Tian, graduate student Laura Stoppel,

similar to fragile X. Restoring brain function after disease onset These findings encouraged the MIT researchers to attempt to improve memory function in the 16p11.2 mice with the same approach that has worked in fragile X mice.

The implication, according to Bear, is that ome cognitive aspects of this disease, previously believed to be an intractable consequence of altered early brain development,

or Lou Gehrig disease. ALS is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that results in the loss of all voluntary movement

especially since the inflammatory and autophagy pathways have been implicated previously in the disease, said Lucie Bruijn, Phd,

Chief Scientist for The ALS Association. he fact that TBK1 accounts for one percent of ALS adds significantly to our growing understanding of the genetic underpinnings of the disease.

LS is an incredibly diverse disease, caused by dozens of different genetic mutations, which wee only beginning to discover.

the better we can deciphernd influencehe pathways that lead to disease. The other co-leaders of the study are Richard M. Myers, Phd, president and scientific director of Hudsonalpha,

and Tim Harris, Phd, DSC, Senior vice president, Technology and Translational Sciences, Biogen idec. hese findings demonstrate the power of exome sequencing in the search for rare variants that predispose individuals to disease and in identifying potential

focused collaborations with the best academic scientists to advance our understanding of the molecular pathology of disease.

The combination of those groups with a large number of the clinical collaborators who have been seeing patients with this disease for many years and providing clinical information

TBK1 mutations appeared in about 1 percent of the ALS patients large proportion in the context of a complex disease with multiple genetic components, according to Dr. Goldstein.

may actually be a major player in the disease. emarkably, the TBK1 protein and optineurin, which is encoded by the OPTN gene,

and mouse models with mutations in TBK1 or OPTN to study ALS disease mechanisms and to screen for drug candidates.

and director of Columbia university-wide precision medicine initiative. t now seems clear that future ALS treatments will not be equally effective for all patients because of the disease genetic diversity.

The new knowledge the project has generated can shed more light on diseases that affect the myelin

This gives science a new tool for studying these cell types in disease models and helps us to understand better how brain cell respond to disease and injury.

There are estimated to be 100 million cells in a mouse brain and 65 billion in a human brain.

#Molecular Inhibitor Breaks Cycle That Leads to Alzheimer's A molecular chaperone has been found to inhibit a key stage in the development of Alzheimer disease and break the toxic chain reaction that leads to the death of brain cells, a new study shows.

A molecule that can block the progress of Alzheimer disease at a crucial stage in its development has been identified by researchers in a new study,

breaking the cycle of events that scientists believe leads to the disease. Specifically, the molecule, called Brichos, sticks to threads made up of malfunctioning proteins, called amyloid fibrils,

which are the hallmark of the disease. By doing so, it stops these threads from coming into contact with other proteins,

scientists have moved closer to identifying a substance that could eventually be used to treat the disease.

great deal of work in this field has gone into understanding which microscopic processes are important in the development of Alzheimer disease;

Alzheimer disease is one of a number of conditions caused by naturally occurring protein molecules folding into the wrong shape

however a second critical step in the disease development. After amyloid fibrils first form from misfolded proteins, they help other proteins

and are thought now to be responsible for the devastating effects of Alzheimer disease. This second stage, known as secondary nucleation, sets off a chain reaction which creates many more toxic oligomers

what happens during the progression of Alzheimer disease, but also what might happen if one stage in the process was switched somehow off. e had reached a stage where we knew what the data should look like

The research team then carried out further tests in which living mouse brain tissue was exposed to amyloid-beta, the specific protein that forms the amyloid fibrils in Alzheimer disease.

confirming that the molecule had suppressed the chain reaction from secondary nucleation that feeds the catastrophic production of oligomers leading to Alzheimer disease.

San diego School of medicine, has identified the microtubule associated-protein protein tau (MAPT) gene as increasing the risk for developing Alzheimer disease (AD).

including Parkinson disease (PD) and AD. These findings provide novel insight into Alzheimer neurodegeneration, possibly opening the door for improved clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Alzheimer disease, which afflicts an estimated 5 million Americans, is characterized typically by progressive decline in cognitive skills, such as memory and language and behavioral changes.

such as PD. hough a tremendous amount of work has been conducted showing the involvement of the tau protein in Alzheimer disease,

Microscopic image depicting plaques and tangles characteristic of Alzheimer disease. Image credit: Tom Deerinck, NCMIR, UC San diego. In the new Molecular Psychiatry paper, conducted with collaborators across the country and world,

and more likely to experience increased brain atrophy than non-carriers. his study demonstrates that tau deposits in the brains of Alzheimer disease subjects are not just a consequence of the disease,

and progression of the disease, said Gerard Schellenberg, Phd, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,

principal investigator of the Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium and a study co-author. n important aspect was the collaborative nature of this work.

Thanks to our collaborators from the Consortium, the International Parkinson Disease Genetics Consortium, the Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer Disease, the Cohorts for Heart and Aging research in Genomic Epidemiology, decode Genetics and the Demgene cohort,

or slow down clinical disease progression have focused on the amyloid pathway. Until this year no one had shown convincingly that the MAPT (tau) gene altered the risk of AD and this,

Their discovery suggests that drugs designed to target NHE9 could help to successfully fight the deadly disease.

so that hopefully we can make this disease less aggressive and less devastating. About this genetics research Other authors of the report include Kalyan Kondapalli, Jose Llongueras, Vivian Capilla-Gonzalez, Hari Prasad, Anniesha Hack, Christopher Smith and Hugo Guerrero

and Extra Copies of Disease Gene in Alzheimer s Brain cells The surprise discovery offers a new understanding of Alzheimer s disease.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found diverse genomic changes in single neurons from the brains of Alzheimer s patients pointing to an unexpected factor that may underpin the most common form of the disease.

Alzheimer s disease is an irreversible brain disease that tends to strike older people. It is progressive#impairing memory destroying motor skills and eventually causing death.

The U s. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5. 3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer s disease

Researchers have known long about disease-related protein accumulations (called amyloid plaques) in the brains of Alzheimer s patients.

They#ve also known that chromosome 21 plays a role in the disease due to Alzheimer s-like symptoms in people with Down syndrome (with three copies of chromosome 21.

so to be able to connect it with a disease is really interesting#said Gwen Kaeser a graduate student studying in Chun#s lab and co-first author of the study with former graduate student Diane Bushman.

Indeed a majority of major brain diseases are also sporadic. For example amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can be linked to a gene in one to two percent of cases

Chun believes genomic mosaicism could possibly have a role in other brain diseases. Future studies in the Chun lab will investigate the relationship between mosaicism

and disease the causes of mosaicism and potential new disease drug targets present in the millions of extra base-pairs found in single Alzheimer s disease neurons.

#'Dog Nose'Light Sniffs Out Disease Here a riddle: What kind of light can smell? Answer:

breath for disease. Gold nanoparticles Could Detect Disease: Discovery Newsprevious studies have shown that diseases such as lung and esophageal cancer,

asthma and diabetes can be all be detected in the breath. Using light to smell might be a little counterintuitive,

but stick with us for a moment. Anstie and his team shine the laser onto a sample of gas.

Disease Detection Goes Mobilee now have a robust system to be able to detect the presence and concentrations of molecules in a sample,

#Lab on a chip turns smart phones into mobile disease clinics Smart phones can pay our bills,

Soon they may become a leading weapon in the global fight against disease. Researchers have designed a cheap,

several detection zones snag any antibodies in the blood that reveal the presence of a particular disease.

and ease of use make it a powerful tool for diagnosing these deadly diseases in the field,

and health workers provide rapid and reliable disease screening in the remotest areas of the world r

but the disease has never spread to more than a few other people, and the general consensus has been that MERS does not spread easily from human to human

The early phase of the disease, just after hospitalization and when symptoms are getting worse,

Yet in similar situations, hundreds of exposed contacts did not develop the disease, says Peter Ben Embarek, the point person on MERS at the World health organization (WHO).

or Koreans may be more susceptible to the disease than other populations, Ben Embarek says. One important piece of evidence will be the genetic sequence of the virus. Ben Embarek says Korea has agreed to share samples with several labs working on MERS,

None of those quarantined or under surveillance in Hong kong and China have showed any signs of illness so far.

but for developing vaccines and studying links between viruses and chronic disease. his is really a technical tour de force,

and old or those with a disease and those withoutnd see whether there a difference in their viral histories.

B2m has also been found at increased levels in patients with Alzheimer disease and other cognitive disorders.

Future versions of the particles could be designed to detect reactive oxygen species that often correlate with disease says Jeremiah Johnson an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT and senior author of the study.

You may be able to learn more about how diseases progress if you have imaging probes that can sense specific biomolecules Johnson says.

and obtain real-time biochemical information about disease sites and also healthy tissues which is not always straightforward.

which should provide a highly useful diagnostic tool with real potential to follow disease progression in vivo says Bottle who was involved not in the study.

or to detect inflammation from irritable bowel disease. These engineered bacteria could also be used as biological computers Lu says adding that they would be particularly useful in types of computation that require a lot of parallel processing such as picking patterns out of an image.

whether a certain disease marker is expressed or whether a neuron is active at a certain time.

In recent years the microbiome has attracted increasing attention for its role in health and disease.

and techniques for treating diseases and conditions linked to an altered microbiome.##Today low-cost genetic sequencing

Disease at MGH. Under their guidance the center will seek to develop a regional ecosystem together with other hospitals universities and research institutions.

The center s initial flagship project will focus on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD. Individuals with IBD which includes conditions such as ulcerative colitis

and many other diseases in the gastrointestinal tract he says. Our goal is to develop new treatment options personalized to an individual s microbiota

and youe trying to screen for some disease, but you don have a lab with you.

Piggybacking on the fundraising bracelet trend of a few years ago, he sold silicone bracelets, raising $60, 000 to fund research on his brother disease.

Metastatic disease should be sensitive to chemotherapy but systemic chemotherapy has not proven effective because it s not getting to the brain at a high enough dose for a long enough period of time says Cima who is also a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

To overcome these delivery issues Cima s lab is working on small implantable devices to deliver drugs for ovarian cancer and bladder disease as well as brain cancer.

#Big step in battling bladder disease The millions of people worldwide who suffer from the painful bladder disease known as interstitial cystitis (IC) may soon have a better, long-term treatment option, thanks

Treating the debilitating disease which causes painful and frequent urination that can interrupt daily life currently requires infusing the drug lidocaine into a patient bladder through a catheter.

But Taris now plans to tailor the platform device to carry other drugs into the bladder to treat various diseases,

With the Allergan acquisition funds, Taris will further develop the device to deliver drugs for other bladder diseases,

and bind with particular molecules within the body such as markers for tumor cells or other disease agents.

This type of high-speed screen could help overcome one of the major bottlenecks in developing disease treatments based on biologics:

#Fish on the flyzebrafish are used commonly to model human diseases in part because their larvae are transparent making it easy to see the effects of genetic mutations or drugs.#

These fatty molecules have shown promise as delivery vehicles for RNA interference a process that allows disease-causing genes to be turned off with small strands of RNA.#

This approach should have utility across multiple disease areas. New leadsthe researchers are now using

#Biologists find an early sign of cancer Years before they show any other signs of disease pancreatic cancer patients have very high levels of certain amino acids in their bloodstream according to a new study from MIT Dana-Farber

This finding which suggests that muscle tissue is broken down in the disease s earliest stages could offer new insights into developing early diagnostics for pancreatic cancer which kills about 40000 Americans every year

We found that higher levels of branched chain amino acids were present in people who went on to develop pancreatic cancer compared to those who did not develop the disease Wolpin says.

Using a gene-editing system that can disable any target gene they have shown that they can selectively kill bacteria carrying harmful genes that confer antibiotic resistance or cause disease.

which causes the disease. This approach gives an accurate count of how many parasites are in the blood an important measure of disease severity

but is not ideal because there is potential for human error. A research team from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research

because you can design them to treat any type of disease by modifying gene expression very specifically says James Dahlman a graduate student in Anderson s

This study is a terrific example of the potential of new RNA therapies to treat disease that was done in a highly collaborative way between biologists

of which epigenetic markers are linked to which diseases. The MIT team is now adapting the device to detect methylation of other cancer-linked genes by changing the DNA sequences of the biochip probes.

Years of frustration give way to progressmental illness exacts an enormous human toll. The leading cause of disability in the United states it affects millions

but Jonathan overcame his illness with the help of lithium a landmark drug first used to treat patients with mental illness in 1949.

and genetics and along with Scolnick and Lander supported the collection of DNA samples from patients with the hope that the samples could someday be analyzed to find disease genes.

When Hyman left the NIMH in 2001 to become provost of Harvard he had lost almost completely hope that true progress could be made in his lifetime in elucidating the mechanisms of psychiatric illness.

Broad investigators have led international consortia that have found thousands of genetic variants responsible for common diseases such as diabetes heart disease

They also plan to expand their sample collection efforts dramatically especially among understudied populations such as those in African nations to reveal the many as-yet-undiscovered mutations relevant to disease.

in order to understand disease mechanisms identify potential biomarkers and ignite needed progress in therapeutics. Launched in 2007 by a $100 million commitment from the Stanley Medical Research Institute the Stanley Center has extensive collaborations with investigators at MIT Harvard and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals as well as with investigators around the world.

discover the molecular basis of major human diseases; develop effective new approaches to diagnostics and therapeutics;

In addition, it is difficult to perform long-term studies of chronic diseases with these implants. To find a better alternative, Boyden, graduate student Amy Chuong,

In people with a disease called retinitis pigmentosa, cones slowly atrophy, eventually causing blindness. Friedrich Miescher Institute scientists Botond Roska and Volker Busskamp have shown previously that some vision can be restored in mice by engineering those cone cells to express light-sensitive proteins.

This type of noninvasive approach to optogenetics could also represent a step toward developing optogenetic treatments for diseases such as epilepsy,

holds great potential for treating many diseases caused by malfunctioning genes. However, it has been difficult for scientists to find safe and effective ways to deliver gene-blocking RNA to the correct targets.

Up to this point, researchers have gotten the best results with RNAI targeted to diseases of the liver,

This raises the possibility of using RNAI to treat many types of disease, including cancer and cardiovascular disease,

To demonstrate the potential for treating lung disease, the researchers used the nanoparticles to block two genes that have been implicated in lung cancer VEGF receptor 1 and Dll4,

and learn more about diseases of endothelial tissue such as atherosclerosis and diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness. ndothelial cells play a very important role in multiple steps of many diseases, from initiation to the onset of clinical complications,

says Aikawa, who was not part of the research team. his kind of technology gives us an extremely powerful tool that can help us understand these devastating vascular diseases.

The researchers plan to test additional potential targets in hopes that these particles could eventually be deployed to treat cancer, atherosclerosis,

and other diseases. Scientists from Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Harvard Medical school also contributed to the study,

including the areas most affected by Parkinson disease, which is caused by the death of dopamine-generating cells.

and other diseases if not mended. The effectiveness of these repair systems varies greatly from person to person;

and potentially enabling prevention or earlier diagnosis of diseases linked to DNA repair. Such a test could also be used to predict patientsresponse to chemotherapy drugs, which often work by damaging cancer cellsdna,

The findings described in the March 30 issue of Nature Biotechnology offer the first evidence that this gene-editing technique known as CRISPR can reverse disease symptoms in living animals.

Scientists envision that this kind of genome editing could one day help treat diseases such as hemophilia Huntington s disease

Disease correctionfor this study the researchers designed three GUIDE RNA strands that target different DNA sequences near the mutation that causes type I tyrosinemia in a gene that codes for an enzyme called FAH.

Patients with this disease which affects about 1 in 100000 people cannot break down the amino acid tyrosine

This was enough to cure the disease allowing the mice to survive after being taken off the NCTB drug.

In particular the authors note that the efficiency of gene editing will need to improve significantly to be relevant for most diseases

and rapidly test new peptides to treat cancer and other diseases, as well as more effective variants of existing peptides, such as insulin, Pentelute says.

and the new technology allows noncommunicable diseases to be detected using the same strategy. The technology developed by MIT professor

The technology can also easily be modified to detect multiple types of peptides released by different types or stages of disease.

or had a family member with the disease. Eventually she would like to see it used for early detection throughout developing nations.

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