Discovery opens doors to improving diagnostics and developing new therapy for majority of ALS patients
Summary
HSCI-funded research using human pluripotent stem cell models and tissue from ALS patients found that the protein TDP-43 regulates a gene called Stathmin2 (STMN2).
Clifford Woolf wants to reboot drug discovery to find a new way to treat pain: effectively and responsibly.
Woolf’s goal is to stop the opioid crisis by rejecting the conventional approach to drug discovery and developing painkillers that do not harm people or communities.
He is using stem cells to create models of pain, outside the body and in a dish, that can be used to screen for drugs swiftly and on a large scale.
The new approach requires ‘all hands’: expertise, equipment, and collaboration in stem...
SMN protein (red) is necessary for the survival of spinal cord neurons (motor neurons) responsible for breathing and all movement. Harvard researchers have found a compound that stabilized this protein in mouse and human motor neurons. This may lead to the development of new...
Zika virus (light blue) spreads through a three-dimensional model of a developing brain. Image courtesy of Max Salick and Nathaniel Kirkpatrick/Novartis
The fast-spreading virus can take multiple routes into developing human nerve cells....
In the spleen, lymphoid tissue (purple) is responsible for launching an immune response to blood-born antigens, while red pulp (pink) filters the blood. Mutations in the C9ORF72 gene, the most common mutation found in ALS patients, can inflame...
Building on earlier work in which they disproved neurobiology dogma by “reprogramming” neurons — turning one form of neuron into another — in the brains of living animals, Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have now shown that the networks of communication among reprogrammed neurons and their neighbors can also be changed, or “rewired.”
