Clinical trials at Cummings School seek to improve the treatments and prognosis for pets—and hopefully someday children—battling osteosarcoma. When Truman, a Bernese mountain dog, started limping in March 2018, his owners did not waste any time getting him to a veterinarian. Unfortunately, X-rays and a subsequent biopsy revealed that Truman had osteosarcoma in his left front leg. An aggressive bone…
Genomics is increasingly grappling with complex issues, and a new group has formed at the Broad Institute to talk about them. The Broad Institute’s bioethics group owes its existence, in part, to a cat named Darwin. Darwin belongs to Elinor Karlsson, Broad’s director of vertebrate genomics, and when he fell ill in 2017, Karlsson took him to the MSPCA-Angell Animal Medical…
Children diagnosed with low-grade astrocytomas, the most common type of pediatric brain tumor, have more than a 90 percent chance of being cured. Yet in the process, the standard treatments (neurosurgery and chemotherapy) for this form of tumor can cause serious side effects, including damaging developing brains and bodies. Researchers at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center recently led an in-depth exploration into…
Clustered protocadherins, a large family of paralogous proteins that play important roles in neuronal development, provide an important case study of interaction specificity in a large eukaryotic protein family. A mammalian genome has more than 50 clustered protocadherin isoforms, which have remarkable homophilic specificity for interactions between cellular surfaces. A large antiparallel dimer interface formed by the first 4 extracellular…
Most pharmaceuticals must either be ingested or injected into the body to do their work. Either way, it takes some time for them to reach their intended targets, and they also tend to spread out to other areas of the body. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a system to deliver medical treatments that can be released at…
A simple and robust DNA-based signal amplification method to simultaneously visualize multiple proteins in tissues has the potential to accelerate many large-scale protein mapping and biomarker discovery projects By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — To better understand how tissues and organs develop, fail to function, and regenerate over time, researchers would like to visualize their constituent cells’ repertoires of molecules within…
Building upon two decades of cutting-edge research around the clinical utility of advanced sequencing, geneticists and genetic counselors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have launched the Preventive Genomics Clinic, the first academically affiliated clinical service to provide comprehensive DNA sequencing, interpretation and reporting of disease-associated genes for healthy adults and their children who are seeking to understand and mitigate their…
For children with Ewing sarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer, a combination of two different classes of drugs may work synergistically to turn off the drivers fueling this disease, finds a new study. The combination appears to be more powerful than relying on either treatment alone. The study, published online last month in Clinical Cancer Research, is the latest in a series of investigations performed by researchers at Dana…
– RINVOQ (upadacitinib) met all primary and ranked secondary endpoints across a variety of patients with moderately to severely active rheumatoid arthritis[1-7]– Durable remission rates with RINVOQ (as assessed by DAS28-CRP<2.6) were observed at week 26[1-2] – RINVOQ significantly inhibited radiographic progression even without methotrexate[1] – Approval supported by efficacy and safety data from one of the largest registrational Phase…
Novo Nordisk to award promising start-ups free space at Boston’s premier, biotech-capable shared lab facility BOSTON, Aug. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Wanted: high-potential life sciences and biotech start-up companies looking for an opportunity to be part of a vibrant innovation ecosystem where companies develop truly transformational science. Novo Nordisk, a global healthcare company committed to discovering, creating and co-creating innovation to solve…
