NEWS

October 24, 2012 | By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

Scientists have demonstrated a new type of gene therapy that would - in principle - allow mothers to avoid saddling their children with rare diseases that could result in heart problems, dementia, diabetes, deafness and other significant health issues. The disorders in question are all due to mutations in one of the 37 genes in our mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use, according to this explainer from the NIH's National Library of Medicine.

HEALTH

September 13, 2012 | By Elaine Herscher

Genes make us who we are - in sickness and in health. We get our genetic makeup from our parents, of course, but in the future, we might be getting genes from our doctors too. Imagine your doctor promising to cure your cancer or heart disease by prescribing some new snippets of DNA. For some diseases, gene therapy is already a reality. In other cases, genetic cures are still years away. Despite many challenges and setbacks - including some that are surely yet to come - experts predict that gene therapy will eventually become a crucial and even common part of healthcare.

SCIENCE

August 15, 2012 | By Rosie Mestel, Los Angeles Times

Dog lovers may be interested in an article published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine: It highlights the discoveries scientists are making about diseases that various dog breeds are prone to -- and how those findings can benefit human health as well as that of canines. It's written by longtime dog genetics researcher Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute. The discoveries are possible because of several things: First off, both the human genome and dog genomes have been sequenced.

SCIENCE

July 20, 2012 | By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

The long-frustrated field of gene therapy is about to reach a major milestone: the first regulatory approval of a gene therapy treatment for disease in the West. The European Medicine Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use said Friday that it is recommending approval of Glybera, a treatment for lipoprotein lipase deficiency manufactured by uniQure of Amsterdam. The European Commission generally follows the recommendations of the agency, and if it does so this time, the product could be available in all 27 members of the European Union by the end of the year.

SCIENCE

July 18, 2012 | By Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times

We like to think of the Olympics as a level playing field - that's why doping is banned. But scientific research complicates this view: There are numerous genetic factors known to confer advantages in athletic contests, from mutations that increase the oxygen carrying capacity of blood to gene variants that confer an incredible increase in endurance, and these mutations appear to be especially common in Olympic athletes. In other words, we may want an egalitarian Olympic games, but it probably isn't in the cards.

NEWS

June 29, 2012 | By Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

Can't kick cigarettes? A vaccine may one day help by preventing nicotine from reaching its target in the brain, according to research published this week. Most smoking therapies do a poor job of stopping the habit - 70% to 80% of smokers who use an approved drug therapy to quit relapse. Scientists say this is because the targets of existing therapies are imperfect, only slightly weakening nicotine's ability to find its target in the brain. So some scientists have been trying a different approach - creation of a vaccine.

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