Michel Sadelain and colleagues, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, have developed a new approach to modulate the expression of genes for therapeutic purposes, and used this to mediate effective anticancer therapy in mice.
Their study is published online, Dec. 1, 2008, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Continue reading “Harnessing miRNA Natural Gene Repressors For Anticancer Therapy”
Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a “plug-and-play” synthetic RNA device–a sort of eminently customizable biological computer–that is capable of taking in and responding to more than one biological or environmental signal at a time.
In the future, such devices could have a multitude of potential medical applications, including being used as sensors to sniff out tumor cells or determine when to turn modified genes on or off during cancer therapy. Continue reading “Bioengineers build first-ever multi-input ‘plug-and-play’ synthetic RNA device”
A dynamic 3D computer animated video takes you “inside” for a close-up look at how we’re made. 3D modeling and animation created by Bill Baker, Bakedmedia, Inc. and Mike Fisher for the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Small, specially designed bits of ribonucleic acid (RNA) can interfere with cholesterol metabolism, reducing harmful cholesterol by two-thirds in pre-clinical tests, according to a new study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center in collaboration with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In a study that appears online today and in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that a single dose of a small interfering RNA (siRNA), a chemical cousin of DNA, lowered cholesterol levels up to 60 percent in rodents, with the effects lasting for weeks.
Biosingularity 