News by Subject Biology

Promising findings from preclinical animal studies and postmortem human brain data show the potential of gene therapy for treating currently incurable neurological disorders. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2019, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

Scientists are finding new ways to improve the use of the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 and reduce the chances of off-target mutations in laboratory mice, according to new results from a research collaboration. The findings, which help scientists contextualize a common concern related to gene editing and identify new strategies to improve its precision, were presented as a featured plenary abstract at the American Society of Human Genetics 2019 Annual Meeting in Houston.

In research that helps scientists better understand and explore treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, scientists have developed a line of mice in which the mouse version of the Alzheimer's-associated MAPT gene has been fully replaced by the human version of the gene. In this new animal model, known as a full gene-replacement model, the MAPT gene will function the same way it does in humans, allowing researchers to more accurately develop and evaluate genetic therapies.

The aim of immunotherapies is to enable the immune system once again to fight cancer on its own. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors are already in clinical use for this purpose. However, they are only effective in about one third of patients. Based on analysis of human tissue samples, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now discovered one reason why this is so: an inactive receptor in cancer cells prevents the drugs from reactivating the immune system.

Researchers have implicated 10 new genes in the development of schizophrenia using a method called whole exome sequencing, the analysis of the portion of DNA that codes for proteins. A global consortium of schizophrenia research teams incorporated genetic data from over 125,000 people to gain deeper insights into the genetic underpinnings of schizophrenia. The research was presented as a featured plenary presentation at the American Society of Human Genetics 2019 Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas.

Gene therapy is showing promise for one of the most common causes of blindness.

This particular inquiry pertains to CCR5 -- a gene which has lately been on the focuses of research worldwide. In particular, CCR5 deletion was used in China to perform the first ever genetic editing on human embryos. It's also known that a CCR5-Δ32 mutation can make people immune to HIV.