Some of the trickier medical problems to deal with are those that are developmental in nature, as these disorders can arise through complicated menageries of genes and regulatory systems to create the negative outcome. And even if the culprit is just a single mutation on a specific gene, it often remains difficult to isolate, identify, […]
Beyond direct improvements to plants, insects, and animals, including humans, that genetic modification technologies have brought to the world, these techniques have also served as crucial tools for modeling other conditions and creating a better understanding of how to not only improve the overall health of living organisms, but also how to combat a myriad […]
Being able to edit the genome of living people has been a long sought after goal of medical research in order to cure any number of genetic disorders. Most such editing research is only able to affect such changes either on a generational level by changing eggs in vivo or in a localized area of […]
The medical field can often perform miracles, using medicines and surgeries to bring people back from the brink of death. Diseases can be cured, but there are limits to what can be fixed. If someone loses a limb, then while the wound left behind may heal, the limb itself won’t magically return. The ability to […]
For all the advances we’ve made in medical science toward treatment of dangerous disorders and diseases, along with recent announcements such as a secondary success in long-term HIV remission, there are still plenty of conditions that we have a long way to go toward any sort of viable treatment. Spinal cord injuries are one such […]
As science has continued its investigation into the inner workings of biology and biological systems on the molecular level, we have managed to unearth more and more complexity in the relationships within not only our own body, but in the world around us. Every organism has a symbiotic and antagonistic relationship with its surroundings, with […]
Research into sexual embryonic development and the forms of offspring progeneration has long been a source of study to determine yet another facet to early formation of the embryo. Mammals are a bit special when it comes to the topic of genetic development of the egg cell. All of our animal cousins among the reptiles, […]
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is how the saying goes. But does that have to be true? A hammer can actually be a quite versatile instrument and, with some insight and ingenuity, be put to tasks that would previously have been thought outside of its purview. A hammer […]
Disease research has a lot of safeguards built in, requirements that must be reached before proper human treatment can be started. While it is true that sometimes these conditions are far more onerous than is fair or essential, they do in a general sense help pave the road for effective human medicine. That is why […]
Personalized medicine has become radically different over the past decade. The speed and lowered cost of genome sequencing has made disease screening far more commonplace and as specific cell-based treatments have improved, some conditions that were once thought incurable are becoming very much not so. For immune system focuses, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)—T cells have […]
