More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and the number is projected to rise to nearly 14 million by 2050. The disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S. And the economic impact is massive, with hundreds of billions spent annually fighting it. Athira Pharma is on a mission to treat the debilitating disorder — and now it has additional…
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is extremely difficult to study because the structure the immune system attacks — called the myelin sheath — is buried deep in the brain and spinal cord. “For autoimmune diseases that affect tissues like the skin, researchers can usually biopsy and study these samples,” says BRI’s Estelle Bettelli, PhD. “But the brain is such a complex organ…
Lysine 27-to-methionine (K27M) mutations in the H3.1 or H3.3 histone genes are characteristic of pediatric diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs). These oncohistone mutations dominantly inhibit histone H3K27 trimethylation and silencing, but it is unknown how oncohistone type affects gliomagenesis. We show that the genomic distributions of H3.1 and H3.3 oncohistones in human patient-derived DMG cells are consistent with the DNA replication-coupled…
Picture the route a car might take through a city. To reach the other side of town, it must navigate a complex network of wide, straight highways, busy streets and avenues, and side roads that bend and curve in unpredictable patterns. Civic engineers and traffic safety experts hoping to understand how differences in this varied environment influence human behavior might…
Despite limited genomic diversity, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has shown a wide range of clinical manifestations in different patient populations. The mechanisms behind these host differences are still unclear. Here, we examined host response gene expression across infection status, viral load, age, and sex among shotgun RNA sequencing profiles of nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs from 430 individuals with…
A new approach to predicting which babies will develop type 1 diabetes (T1D) — which could help them avoid life-threatening complications — is closer to becoming part of routine testing for newborns. The Hagopian lab, located at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI), is part of a pioneering international study following more than 8,000 children with increased genetic risk for…
Six months after COVID-19 shut down world economies, closed borders and unleashed sickness and death around the globe, the pandemic has helped to break open the cloistered world of medical research. “Open science” is a movement predating the pandemic, largely led by younger researchers eager to cast aside the arcane rules of academic publishing and often secretive, slow peer reviews…
The authors have found a new pathway of cell resistance to viruses that is broad, working against Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. This pathway involves a newly uncovered new role for CIITA and CD74, which are traditionally associated with antigen presentation. They used a novel transposon screening platform that both activates and inactivates genes in a truly genome-wide way, like a combined CRISPRi/ CRISPRa screen.
When graduate student Kate Dusenbury Crawford returned to the lab from her honeymoon on Jan. 20, she had no idea it was a fateful day in her nascent scientific career. The M.D./Ph.D. student in Dr. Jesse Bloom’s lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center studies the proteins that viruses like Ebola and rabies use to enter cells — work that could…
Merck is making a major investment into Bothwell, Washington-based Seattle Genetics with two strategic oncology deals. Seattle Genetics’ shares rocketed 12% in premarket trading at the news. In the first deal, the two companies will work to develop Seattle Genetics’ ladiratuzumab vedotin both as a monotherapy and with Merck’s checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in triple-negative breast cancer, hormone receptor-positive breast cancer and other LIV-1-expressing…
