virus news from FierceBioResearcher

Investigators have determined that a virus may play a key role in promoting obesity in some people. The researchers say that adenovirus-36--a well known respiratory virus--turns adult stem cells Read more...

The amazingly hot field of synthetic biology has now spawned an engineered virus that attacks bacteria. Timothy Lu, a doctoral student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Read more...

Stem Cell Research

Iowa's governor has signed new legislation lifting restrictions on stem cell research, calling for the creation of stem cell lines through cloning. Report

Stem cell banks are growing in popularity, but critics say that there's still more hype than hope involved. …

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Once cells become cancerous they are 100 times more likely to genetically mutate than normal cells, according to researchers. And that conclusion could spell serious trouble for research programs that seek to control a single gene involved in malignancy. "This is very bad news, because it means that cancer cells in a tumor will have mutations that protect them from therapeutics," said lead investigator Lawrence Loeb of the University of Washington School of Medicine. The research also …

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The Guardian covers the development of a new generation of virus-vectored vaccines that promise to take on a number of diseases like malaria. Instead of a traditional approach using weakened virus to produce antibodies that fight disease, researchers are adding the genetic code of molecules into the DNA of the virus. That approach is believed to be more effective in …

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MORE RESEARCH

Steve Bloom at Imperial College London's Hammersmith Hospital is developing a new obesity drug from a hormone found in the gut. Bloom's research team has linked gut hormones, which are released while a person eats, to appetite control. Their work is concentrating on the pancreatic polypeptide to emit signals to the brain to stop eating. …

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Oxford University's Leonard Seymour and a group of his colleagues are preparing to move a new approach to fighting cancer into human trials. They've been working on viruses that target cancer cells in the hope that the new approach could be used to replace chemotherapy, which has a host of harsh side effects. In order to make it work, the scientists had to create a polymer coat for the virus to shield it from destruction by the human immune system. That has allowed the virus, in animal …

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Immunologists studying T-cells say that the presence of even a small amount of virus can quickly turn on the T-cells, which hunt them down and kill them. Researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia say that "antigen presenting" proteins recognize the virus, attach to the virus and make it visible to the immune system, which dispatches T-cells to kill the virus. …

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A research team at the Medical College of Georgia has determined that regulatory T cells learn to distinguish between normal body tissue and outside invaders early in life. If researchers can learn how to control T cell education in childhood, it could form the basis for preventing autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes or lupus. The team also concluded that regulatory T cells are produced in the thymus, a small organ located in the chest area. The regulatory T cells learn in the thymus …

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Scientists at UF McKnight Brain Institute were able to take human brain cells from a mature epilepsy patient to create new brain tissue in mice. "We can theoretically take a single brain cell out of a human being and--with just this one cell--generate enough brain cells to replace every cell of the donor's brain and conceivably those of 50 million other people," said Dennis Steindler, Ph.D., executive director of the institute. "This is a completely new source of human brain cells that …

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