Stress can make you wish life had a pause button. Single-celled organisms like yeast actually have this option. Faced with a lack of food or other stressors, baker’s yeast can enter a “paused,” energy- and resource-conserving state called quiescence. In this paused state, in which DNA becomes more compact and most genes are shut off, yeast can live weeks or…
Seattle-based biotech startup Immusoftthis week closed a $20 million Series B venture capital round that will fuel development of its gene therapy technology. Founded in 2009, Immusoft develops immune cell technology that uses blood cells from a patient to create therapeutic proteins targeted to treat diseases. The process is called immune system programming, or ISP, and was invented by Nobel laureate David…
Few scientists have had a more massive contribution to genetics than Mary-Claire King of the University of Washington. King (Figure 1) was the first to show that breast cancer is inherited in some families as a result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1. She had already changed our view of evolution when she demonstrated during her PhD work…
IDRI is partner in a European Union-funded consortium that is focused on demonstrating how advanced computer modelling and simulation can be used to reduce the costs of the clinical trials to test the efficacy of new therapies for tuberculosis. In a step towards that goal, the STriTuVaD consortium recently published a technical report entitled “A Computer Modeling System of the Dynamics…
In an exciting breakthrough that may have implications for stem cell-based treatment of heart disease, the lab of Dr. Deok-Ho Kim at the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM) has successfully used silk-based materials to enhance the development of stem-cell derived cardiomyocytes. In a recent study detailed in the Journal of Materials Chemistry, Dr. Kim and his lab…
Dr. Kelly Paulson, a Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center postdoctoral fellow in the Chapuis Lab, was on the hunt. She was tracking her quarry’s traces and the devastation it left behind. But it stayed just beyond her grasp. Paulson was trying to find the source of a cancer recurrence. The patient’s rare, aggressive skin cancer had responded to immunotherapy for 22 months…
We like to keep the air in our homes as clean as possible, and sometimes we use HEPA air filters to keep offending allergens and dust particles at bay. But some hazardous compounds are too small to be trapped in these filters. Small molecules like chloroform, which is present in small amounts in chlorinated water, or benzene, which is a component of…
One of the most complicated parts of your body — your brain — takes decades to come into its own. Human brain development begins before we are born and continues well into late teenage years and even early adulthood. Understanding this long and complex process is no easy feat. In a newly published study, which was itself several years in the…
Thirteen years ago, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center spun out a small startup with a mission to help researchers get a handle on all the data that medical devices were generating. That company, LabKey, has since grown from six to 50 employees and counts Merck, MIT and Britain’s public health agency as clients. But the company never strayed far from home, now…