Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
Regrowing brain tissue? With the help of gene therapy, stroke victims can recover motor function
Most stroke victims don’t receive treatment fast enough to prevent brain damage, but scientists at the Ohio State University Wexner ...
‘Broken heart syndrome’: High stress, emotional situations can kill you
[Takotsubo syndrome, or TTS,] is characterised by a sudden temporary weakening of the heart muscles that causes the left ventricle ...
What’s your biological age? There’s a genetic clock that could tell you
Biological age isn’t as simple as counting the number of birthday candles you’ve blown out like your chronological age. Rather, ...
Critics say gene drives could lead to species extinction. Scientists have developed a brake system
By exerting control over the degree of spread, those who unleash gene drives may realize the benefits promised by gene ...
The placebo effect and pain reduction: Brain imaging helps explain how it works
Does the placebo [effect] change the way a person constructs the experience of pain, or is it changing the way ...
Obesity contributor? Fructose — a commonly used sweetener — disrupts our immune system, study shows
Fructose is a type of simple sugar that makes up 50% of table sugar. It is found in sugary drinks ...
Organs on a chip? Device tracks Parkinson’s disease by modeling how the gut microbiome interacts with the brain, liver, and colon
[B]acteria living in our gut can influence some neurological diseases. To help researchers better understand how this gut-brain axis communicates, ...
One a day keeps the doctor away? Eating apples appears to boost brain function
Given that apples are one of the most widely consumed fruits in the world, [researchers Tara Louise] Walker, [Gerd] Kempermann ...
How COVID is revolutionizing vaccine development and production
According to Charles Christy, head of commercial solutions, Ibex Dedicate, Lonza, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been driving ...
Antidepressant paroxetine could halt osteoarthritis and degenerative cartilage damage
Research headed by scientists at Penn State College of Medicine has found that the antidepressant paroxetine can halt the progression ...
There are 400 children worldwide with progeria, a rapid-aging disease. Now there’s a potential treatment
The prevalence of [Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, or] HGPS is approximately 1 in 20 million, so at any given time, there ...
Synthetic biology is creating a more sustainable world—advancing precision medicine, curbing pollution, conserving energy and securing data
Synthetic biology has become a powerful tool to advance science, making processes more efficient, enabling completely new approaches to biology, ...
Loss of smell, headaches, nausea and other neurological effects suggest COVID enters the brain through the nose
Although recent studies have noted the presence of viral RNA in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), it remains unclear ...
What the brain looks like when we’re lonely
A new study, headed by a team at McGill University, has now identified neurobiological signatures in the brains of lonely ...
Genetically-engineered vaccine shows promise in elusive quest to control herpes
A genetically edited form of a herpes simplex virus (HSV) has outperformed a leading vaccine candidate in a new preclinical ...
Precision medicines addressing unique diseases are poised to become more accessible
Today, companies are developing new models to lower the costs of manufacturing and bring [precision medicine] drugs to more patients ...
Seasonal cold infections might generate protective antibodies against COVID-19
[S]easonal coronavirus infections occur frequently and typically result in a mild, common cold-like illness. The presence of these coronavirus infections ...
CRISPR gene editing to correct harmful mutations could in rare cases wreak havoc on our chromosomes, study claims
[L]arge-scale damage was found in a study that analyzed human embryos that had been edited with CRISPR-Cas9. The study, from ...
Brain aging and dementia remain a mystery. This epigenetic model may help unravel it
People age at different rates, with some individuals developing both characteristics and diseases related to aging earlier in life than ...
Will antibody therapies work on patients with severe COVID? Setbacks in new Lilly, Regeneron drugs raise serious doubts
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly have [reported clinical study setbacks, which] raised questions about the effectiveness of antibody therapies in ...
Gene therapy may be able to restore vision
In a normal eye, opsins are expressed by the rod and cone photoreceptors in the retina. When activated by light, ...
Picking up where GMOs left off: CRISPR leads the way to ‘greener’ food production in the 21st century
Genome editing may be one of the solutions to address climate change. A September 2020 report by the Information Technology ...
Resurgence of gene therapy has dramatically altered the the biomedicine revolution
Some technologies that have emerged and altered the landscape in recent years include immunotherapy, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, and chimeric antigen ...
‘Gigantic leaps forward’ What’s happened in the 21 years since a teenager died undergoing gene therapy, stalling emergence of this biomedical breakthrough?
In 1999, [teenager] Jesse [Gelsinger] received a dose of the ornithine transcarbamylase gene, engineered into a recombinant adenovirus, at the ...
Vitamin D shown to reduce severe symptoms of COVID
[A new study suggests] that improving vitamin D status in the general population, and in particular in patients hospitalized with ...
Trump’s treatments primer: Regeneron antibodies and Gilead’s Remdesivir
[After Trump’s COVID diagnosis,] his treatment began with a leading drug candidate, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ two-antibody combination or “cocktail,” REGN-COV2. Within ...
Designing a more effective flu vaccine
A growing body of evidence suggests that a history of exposure to influenza virus might be undermining the effectiveness of ...
