This week’s headlines include: Alzheimer’s disease Is Completely Reversed by Removing Just One Enzyme in New Study, Drug copies ready to take next bite out of Roche’s cancer sales, Can Gene Therapy Be Harnessed to Fight the AIDS Virus, Hantavirus vaccine ‘moderately’ effective against hemorrhagic fever, The Flu Vaccine Is Working Better Than Expected, C.D.C. Finds, and Using stem cells to generate an immune attack against cancer.
I have compiled a list of our most popular Cool Tools Features for 2017. Here are the top 15 in alphabetical order…
“For more than a decade, the strongest AIDS drugs could not fully control Matt Chappell’s HIV infection. Now his body controls it by itself, and researchers are trying to perfect the gene editing that made this possible. Scientists removed some of his blood cells, disabled a gene to help them resist HIV, and returned these “edited” cells to him in 2014. So far, it has given the San Francisco man the next best thing to a cure…”
“An inactivated Hantavirus vaccine was moderately effective against hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome among South Korean military personnel, according to researchers. The findings are important because they show a degree of protection against
the illness (HFRS), which has a high mortality rate and no effective treatment, they wrote in
The Journal of Infectious Diseases…”
“The flu vaccine is more effective than expected, federal health officials said on Thursday at a special news conference held to discuss the dangerous flu season, which is expected to kill more than 50,000 Americans. This year’s vaccine is about 25 percent effective against the H3N2 strain of flu that is causing most illnesses and deaths, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…”
“Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have the power to transform into any cell in the body, making them a prime candidate for regenerative medicine. But can they also teach the immune system to recognize and attack cancer? Scientists at Stanford University believe iPSCs can do just that—and they tested the concept in mouse models of breast cancer. When they injected mice with inactivated IPSCs, the animals’ immune systems launched an attack against cancer and prevented relapse after tumors had been removed, according to a press release from the university. The
study was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell…”