There is encouraging news this week on the prospects for an effective vaccine against HIV. A research team led by Professor Mariano Esteban at the Spanish Superior Scientific Research Council (CSIC) have announced that the vaccine MVA-B elicited a persistent immune response against HIV in 85% of volunteers in a phase 1 clinical trial. MVA-B … Continue reading Mice and macaques pave the way for effective HIV vaccines
Tag: mice
Mice show the way to improved stem cell therapy for heart attacks
When the results of clinical trials do not live up to expectations from pre-clinical studies in animals it can be all too easy to ascribe the divergence to species differences, however scientists are increasingly aware that in many, even most cases, the problem may not be species differences but rather differences in the design of studies in … Continue reading Mice show the way to improved stem cell therapy for heart attacks
Lighting the Way to New Treatments
A variety of diseases in humans happen when proteins with important cellular functions are lacking or are produced in abnormally low amounts. One example is type-2 diabetes mellitus which is caused by a complex set of problems involving the use of sugars (mostly, glucose) as an energy source. After eating, sugars in food are taken … Continue reading Lighting the Way to New Treatments
Have No Fear, Mice Are Here
This nice report from PBS Chicago describes how researchers at Northwestern University are using mice to study post-traumatic stress disorder, and get at the basic mechanisms of fear. They already have positive results with experimental drugs that could eventually be used to treat people and prevent traumatic memories from taking over their lives -- whether … Continue reading Have No Fear, Mice Are Here
Albert Sabin and the monkeys who gave summer back to the children.
Albert Sabin has been called “the doctor who gave summer back to the children.”* Because of his decades of research to develop the oral polio vaccine, children today know nothing of the fear that polio brought to the United States every summer well into the 20th century. Swimming pools and movie theaters were closed and … Continue reading Albert Sabin and the monkeys who gave summer back to the children.
Mice help identify promising prostate cancer treatment
Prostate cancer is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, so the news today that in a clinical trial of more than 1,000 men a new drug named abiraterone acetate prolonged the lives of patients with advanced prostate cancer in a by an average of four months has been greeted with considerable excitement. … Continue reading Mice help identify promising prostate cancer treatment
Symposium Explores Animal Rights Tactics, Responses
On Saturday April 24, 2010, the American Physiological Society sponsored a symposium on Trends in Animal Rights Activism and Extremism. This event, attended by about 100 people, was part of the Experimental Biology 2010 meeting, which was recently held in Anaheim, California. In introducing the symposium, session chair Bill Yates noted the importance of animal … Continue reading Symposium Explores Animal Rights Tactics, Responses
RNAi: Send in the Nanobots!
The publication of the preliminary results of a small clinical trial of a new therapy called RNA interference (RNAi) online in the scientific journal Nature is causing quite a stir in the scientific community this week. A team led by Professor Mark E. Davis at Caltech targeted the delivery of a nanoparticle only 70 nanometers … Continue reading RNAi: Send in the Nanobots!
Speaking of Research 