(Credit: Pietro Artoni/Boston Children’s Hospital) Autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders often aren’t diagnosed until a child is a few years of age, when behavioral interventions and speech/occupational therapy become less effective. But new research this week in PNAS suggests that two simple, quantifiable measures — spontaneous fluctuations in pupil dilation or heart rate — could enable much earlier diagnosis of Rett syndrome and possibly other…
Three weeks after the start of the new fiscal year, Democratic leaders finalized a fiscal 2020 budget agreement over the weekend to end a weeks-long stalemate and authorize $43.1 billion in state government spending over the next year. The deal, which is expected to be voted on Monday by both the House and Senate, puts the state in position to…
3D InSight™ Human Liver Disease platform provides the most physiologically relevant testing environment for efficacy and safety InSphero 07/19/2019 Schlieren, Switzerland – July 17, 2019 InSphero AG today announced a breakthrough in 3D cell technology for drug discovery and safety testing with the launch of its 3D InSight™ Human Liver Disease Discovery Platform for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The…
DNA helicopters offer insight into how biological machines power living things BY Caitlin McDermott-MurphyHarvard Correspondent For decades, researchers have chased ways to study how biological machines power living things. Every mechanical movement — from contracting a muscle to replicating DNA — relies on energy-fueled molecular motors that take tiny, near-undetectable steps. Trying to see these movements is like trying to watch…
Michelle Long, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine, has been awarded a three-year, $495,000 Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award provides grants to early-career physician scientists to facilitate their transition to independent clinical research careers. Dr. Long, a gastroenterologist at Boston Medical Center (BMC), was one of…
Glioblastoma is an incurable brain cancer that kills most patients less than two years after diagnosis. The disease is difficult to treat largely because tumors each contain multiple kinds of cells. The aggressive brain cancer can also vastly differ between patients, so much so that researchers debate whether glioblastoma should be considered a single disease. A new study may help…
Throughout the animal kingdom, males and females frequently exhibit sexual dimorphism: differences in characteristic traits that often make it easy to tell them apart. In mammals, one of the most common sex-biased traits is size, with males typically being larger than females. This is true in humans: Men are, on average, taller than women. However, biological differences among males and…
Boehringer Ingelheim has entered into a collaboration and global license agreement for Bridge Biotherapeutics’s autotaxin inhibitor BBT-877 to be developed for fibrosing interstitial lung diseases including IPF With this new partnership Boehringer Ingelheim further expands its commitment to bring new treatments to patients with fibrosing interstitial lung diseases including IPF Bridge Biotherapeutics stands to receive up to more than EUR…
BURLINGTON, Mass. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — MilliporeSigma and the Broad Institute of MITand Harvard today announced an agreement to offer non-exclusive licenses to CRISPR intellectual property (IP) under their respective control for use in commercial research and product development. “Together with the Broad Institute, we are simplifying the path to licensing CRISPR technology, which will make it more widely available to the global research and…
The 2019 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize has been awarded to four scientists for pioneering work in the field of optogenetics, a revolutionary technique that uses light and genetic modification to control the activity of cells in the brain. Optogenetics holds promise not only for unraveling some of the brain’s more confounding mysteries, including decision-making and behavior, but also for elucidating and manipulating…
