Medical research

Sickle cell anemia as malaria defense

Sickle cell anemia causes pain, fatigue and delayed growth, all because of a lack of enough healthy red blood cells. And yet genetic mutations that cause it - recessive genes for the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin protein - have ...

Genetics

Scientists discover important genetic source of human diversity

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report that humans have a surprisingly high number of genes in which one of two copies has been randomly silenced. They suggest that the phenomenon is ...

Medical research

Helping transplanted stem cells stick around and do their jobs

Bone marrow transplants of hematopoietic stem cells have become standard treatment for a host of conditions including cancers of the blood and lymphatic systems, sickle cell anemia, inherited metabolic disorders, and radiation ...

Medical research

Genome engineering paves the way for sickle cell cure

A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

COVID-19: Who's at higher risk of serious symptoms?

Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it's important to remind people who is more at risk of serious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) symptoms, which can vary widely. Some people have no symptoms at all, while others ...

Medical research

Mystery solved: How sickle hemoglobin protects against malaria

The latest issue of the journal Cell carries an article that is likely to help solve one of the long-standing mysteries of biomedicine. In a study that challenges currently held views, researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian ...

Medical research

Gene therapy for blood disorders

Gene therapy holds a lot of promise in medicine. If we could safely alter our own DNA, we might eliminate diseases our ancestors passed down to us.

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