Health and Medicine

New research published in BMC Molecular Biology explains how a new technique for introducing genes into mammalian cells using the virus responsible for warts could be a major step forward in developing gene therapy treatments for people with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), a genetic disease that affects around 12 million people worldwide.

People with FH have a genetic defect that prevents their liver cells from absorbing chlolesterol in the form of low density lipoprotein (LDL). This lea

Researchers in the University of Warwick’s Molecular Medicine Research Centre have found the “Bin Laden” of cancer causing faulty proteins. They have undermined the old complex model of how many cancers start and identified a single protein known as c-Myc as a “mission-critical target for effective cancer therapies.”

Fighting cancer is similar to the war against terrorism. Current cancer models suggest that a network of several cell mutations is needed to begin a cancer. Both terrorism and c

Wound healing appears generally a banal event, but in a certain proportion of cases it evolves inappropriately in hypertrophic scars resulting in skin and organ deformations. This is due to an excess of wound contraction, a phenomenon that generally helps to close the wound. Hypertrophic scarring is observed frequently in burned patients.

For the past 30 years, Professor Giulio Gabbiani and his team are interested in the role of myofibroblasts in wound contraction. Myofibroblasts, specializ

A US study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET concludes that the antibiotic azithromycin is ineffective for treating bronchitis, even though it is often prescribed by physicians for this condition.

Azithromycin is an expensive, broad-spectrum antibiotic; there is limited evidence about its effectiveness in treating bronchitis. Arthur Evans and colleagues from Cook County Hospital, Chicago, USA, investigated whether people with bronchitis given azithromycin returned to work earlier, and had

The barrier that ‘good parents’ can provide for their children against the drugs culture is beginning to break down in cities where drugs are most freely available, researchers have found.

But the international study, led by Newcastle University in England, concluded that having a caring mother was the single most important factor in preventing youngsters from taking drugs.

The study, funded by the European Commission, found that 14 and 15 year-olds were far less likely to have drug

A team of researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has cured mice with diabetes type 1 for the first time. In the experiment, the diabetic mice completely recovered from the disease after having suffered excesses of glucose in their blood. Although the mice used were transgenic, the researchers are sure that there will soon be a genic therapy based on this discovery that will cure non-transgenic mice with diabetes type 1, and which, within a few years, will also be able to cure pe