July 14th, 2010 by admin
Chang Lu and his chemical engineering research group at Virginia Tech have discovered how to “greatly enhance” the delivery of DNA payloads into cells. The description of their work will be featured on the cover of Lab on a Chip, the premier journal for researchers in microfluidics. Lu’s ultimate goal is to apply this technique [...]
July 8th, 2010 by admin
Building on research work undertaken in Germany, City of Hope investigators near LA have used modified stem cells loaded with gene sequences to fight off HIV. And the scientists in the study say that the work points to a possible cure for the dread virus, which has killed millions of people around the world.
July 5th, 2010 by admin
While the overall economy may be flagging, Maryland says that its biotech industry is booming. And the governor wants to keep the momentum going with a few new industry incentives. Gov. Martin O’Malley told reporters that the biotech industry added more than a thousand jobs in the last three months; that’s 10 percent of the [...]
July 2nd, 2010 by admin
Craig Venter has never been reluctant to credit himself for a lead role in sequencing the human genome. And he’s certainly not the least bit shy about placing a high value on the overall significance of the work. “I think it’s far more important than walking on the Moon; not much has happened since walking [...]
June 22nd, 2010 by admin
Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have for the first time differentiated human stem cells to become heart cells with cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle cells are abnormal. The discovery will allow scientists to learn how those heart cells become diseased and from there, they can begin developing drug therapies to [...]
June 17th, 2010 by admin
The scramble to come up with a faster and cheaper way to sequence a genome just got a credible new contender which aims to do the job for the bargain basement rate of $30. The first time scientists sequenced a human genome, the price tag hit $3 billion. That price point has quickly plunged to [...]
May 21st, 2010 by admin
In a single day, a solitary grad student at a lab bench can produce more simple logic circuits than the world’s entire output of silicon chips in a month. So says a Duke University engineer, who believes that the next generation of these logic circuits at the heart of computers will be produced inexpensively in [...]
April 30th, 2010 by admin
Scientists from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Oklahoma City made a huge step toward making the blind see, and they did it by using a form of gene therapy that does not involve the use of modified viruses. In a research report published in the April 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal, scientists describe how they [...]
April 28th, 2010 by admin
Personal health recommendations and diets tailored to better prevent diseases may be in our future, just by focusing on genetics. Researchers at Kansas State University recently published an academic journal article discussing the potential for nutrigenomics, a field that studies the effects of food on gene expression. The researchers discussed the possibility of using [...]
April 21st, 2010 by admin
The molecular machinery that switches on a gene known to cause breast cancer to spread and invade other organs has been identified by an international team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. The paper was published in Nature Cell Biology’s advanced online publication.