Science and Health News

Rigor and reproducibility are essential to the ability of scientific discoveries to advance scientific knowledge and to enable its translation into therapeutics and diagnostics in the clinic.  Senior staff researchers of the Center for Developmental Therapeutics (CDT), Irawati Kandela, Fraser Aird, and Christine Mantis, are playing a significant role inThe Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology through their efforts to reproduce the findings of three seminal studies in the field of cancer biology.  These replication studies were the among the first five associated with the Reproducibility to be published on January 19th in eLife.  Commentaries on their findings were published in major scientific journals, including Science and Nature and earned a featured place in NPR’s Science Friday broadcast and an article in the Washington Post.

A research team has successfully used magnets implanted behind a person’s eyes to treat nystagmus, a condition characterised by involuntary eye movements.

Cells that Alert Nervous System to Intestinal Trouble Could Provide New Target for Gastrointestinal Treatments

New King’s College London research suggests that sons of older fathers are more intelligent, more focused on their interests and less concerned about fitting in, all characteristics typically seen in ‘geeks’.

Using a new skin cell model, researchers have overcome a barrier that previously prevented the study of living tissue from people at risk for early heart disease and stroke. This research could lead to a new understanding of disease progression in aortic aneurysm – ballooning of the large artery in the chest that carries blood from the heart to the body.

First direct evidence that abnormal protein in Parkinson’s disease triggers immune response

When Will We Clone a Human? Human cloning may endure as one of the go-to science fiction tropes, but in reality we may be much closer to achieving it than our fictional heroes might imply.

The longest lived laboratory mice, more than a decade after the creation of the first lineage, are still those with impaired growth hormone signaling. That record has yet to be overtaken, and I suspect that it may well stand unbroken until the development of rejuvenation therapies based on damage repair is further advanced, and senescent cell clearance is joined by other types of therapy, their effects adding together. Thus growth hormone and growth hormone receptor genes in humans are one of the places to look for variants and mutations that might improve our understanding of how metabolism influences aging, and as a bonus for those interested in pharmacological or genetic adjustment of metabolism, may lead to ways to modestly slow aging.