Leukemia drug treatsms, even when others fail
Scientists expand catalog of human genetic variation
Scientists are one step closer to unravelinghowvariations in thehumanDNAand may influence the incidence of disease.
OnWednesday, researchers reported the latest results from the 1000 Genomes Project, which seeks to map out human genetic variation, in the journalNature.
SequencingDNA from1,092 people from 14 populations, they identified 38 million DNA variants in the genome — the collection of 6 billionDNA letters that form the biological blueprint for a person.
Having such a “dense catalog” of DNA variants should help researchers figure out what genetic variations correlate with disease, said Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford Medical School and a participant in the project. In the future, when researchers sequence the genome of a person with, say, diabetes, they’ll be able to compare the variations they find in that subject’s DNA to the 1000 Genomes reference genomes to do a sort of “first-level
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check” — to begin to figure out if a particular genetic difference is or isn’t the cause of the disease.
Aravinda Chakravarti, professor of medicine and pediatrics and a member of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, helped to design the population genetics sampling plan, Hopkins said.
Four researchers from the Institute for Genome Sciences participated, including co-principal investigator Scott E. Devine, associate professor of medicine at the University ofMaryland School ofMedicine.
Quick-release tape could protect neonatal skin
Every year, Americans suffer more than 1.5 injuries from medical tape removal — and the ones who suffer most are babies in neonatal units, whose fragile skin is easily ripped when nurses and doctors remove medical devices affixed to the infants by super-sticky adhesive. Some kids suffer permanent scarring. Senior citizens are frequently hurt by tape removal, too.
To try to help out these fragile-skinned patients, a team of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, along with collaborators at MIT, have invented a new type of quick-release medical tape that may reduce skin injuries.
When ripped away from the body, with its three-layer design that inserts a laseretched release liner between the tape backing and the sticky adhesive, it doesn’t tear apart fromthe skin. Rather, the backing of the tape peels away from the sticky stuff, leaving a coating of adhesive on the skin that can then be gently removed “using a rolling motion.”
“We designed quick-release medical tape for sensitive skin such that the weakest attachment point is between the backing and adhesive layers, thereby avoiding large stresses and strains on the skin during removal,” wrote the team in an article Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A drug used to treat leukemia was successful in treating relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, beating out the primary MS drug, interferon beta 1a, in two clinical trials reported Wednesday. The drug was also more effective in treating patients who had failed treatment with current drugs. The new drug, called alemtuzumab, could be approved for marketing as early as this year. The drug has some relatively severe side effects, but clinicians are confident those can be controlled with careful monitoring.
Multiple sclerosis affects about 400,000 people in the United States. The precise cause is not known, but symptoms occur when the body’s immune system attacks themyelin sheaths surrounding nerves— in effect, short-circuiting the nerves. There is no cure.