Stem cells were the pioneering force behind the new wave of personalized medicine of the last decade, while CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques have come to revolutionize gene therapy and the treatment of genetic diseases. It had to happen that they would eventually join forces. A new study has used gene-edited stem cells to revert […]
Gene therapy was a 90s hit. The most promising medical advance of the decade was almost forgotten after some really serious side effects occurred in one clinical trial, but after nearly 3 decades a small trial in Germany has shown gene therapy not only to be safe for use in humans but also to have […]
In a new publication led by Dr. Albert Giralt, the researchers discovered the interaction between a transcription factor identified as “Helios” and a protein called “WDFY1” that could help elucidate the link between immunity and schizophrenia . Schizophrenia is an incurable mental illness characterized by relapsing episodes of psychosis. This disorder affects approximately 1% of […]
For a long time Alzheimer disease has been studied mostly as a neuronal disease. However, recently the role of the immune system is getting more attention and its involvement more clear. Recent research has shown that a subpopulation of T cells could be key to early Alzheimer’s detection. How were these T cells discovered? Firstly […]
Wouldn´t it be great to have a drug that could kill specifically our old damaged cells allowing us to have a better health at an advanced age? But we are not talking about a dreamed magic immortality pill. Senolytic drugs, compounds that kill senescent cells, are already a reality and represent a new concept that […]
“The b rain is considered an isolated tissue from the rest of the body thanks to the blood-brain-barrier, which separates it at cellular level with a very strict control”. That was supposed in the past, at least until now… In 2019 a striking discovery led by the researcher Moreno-Jimenez demonstrated human neurogenesis is abundant and […]
I know it seems like an absurd question to start with: can a foetus without egg and sperm even exist? As scientists show in a recently published article in the journal Cell , at least for mouse embryos in the lab, it is not only possible, it is a reality. These researchers used EPS, short […]
One of the hardest things when dealing with psychiatric illness is to come up with a clear diagnosis, but it seems that now it might be possible to diagnose schizophrenia just by analysing a certain biomarker in people’s hair. In an article recently published in the EMBO Journal of Molecular Medicine , a Japanese group […]
That female fertility is not stable during a woman’s lifetime is nothing new, but now a new study in the journal Science has found an explanation to its inverted U shape: chromosome errors! This inverted U shape for female fertility means that adolescent women and women over their mid-30s are not as fertile as those […]
After the big scandal of the CRISPR babies at the end of 2018, some might have thought that would be the end of CRISPR in the clinic, but luckily that has not been the case and despite the public outrage of last year, today we can report on its successful use as gene therapy against […]