It was a good year for new treatments for genetic diseases! Of the 44 FDA approvals of new drugs, 8 were for 6…
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post FDA Approvals in 2019 Reflect Eclectic Ways to Treat Genetic Disease
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post 5,700-Year-Old Lola, Her Genome Sequenced from Gum, Joins Other Named Forebears
About 5,700 years ago in southern Denmark, a woman enjoyed a meal of hazelnuts and duck, then chewed gum made from the…
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post Family with Two Rare Syndromes Reveals Immunity Glitch
Members of a three-generation family in France who suffer from widespread infections and fragile skin, joints, bones, and blood vessels share an…
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post Camel Milk and Autism: Connecting the Genetic Dots
After reading Christina Adams’s new book Camel Crazy: A Quest for Miracles in the Mysterious World of Camels (New World Library), I may…
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post FDA Scrutinizes Fecal Transplants
On Monday November 5, officials at the FDA listened for three hours to arguments for and against “fecal microbiota transplants” – mostly…
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post The Peaceable Genomes of Pumpkins
Anyone who’s tossed a pumpkin onto the lawn after Halloween to discover vines snaking along the ground the next summer knows how…
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post When the Target Isn’t Really the Target: One Way Cancer Drugs Fall Out of Clinical Trials
Ninety-seven percent of potential new cancer drugs never make it to market, dropping out of clinical trials when they don’t meet measures…
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post Breast Cancer Genetic Testing for All Women?
“I have no family history of breast cancer,” says the woman in a public service announcement stressing the importance of mammograms for…
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post A New Meaning for Strip Steak: Making Red Meat Safer to Eat
Despite the rising popularity of plant-based burgers like the Impossible and Beyond, plenty of people still like the real deal. Many studies have…
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post Gene Therapy Update: Remembering Jesse Gelsinger
Like the mythological phoenix bird, gene therapy has risen from the ashes and is spreading its wings. September 17 marked 20 years…
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post A Child’s Shattered Chromosomes Illustrate the Value of Supportive Therapies
To a trained eye, the chromosome chart (karyotype) above has 4 irregularities, circled in red. They’re chromosome pairs of uneven size. The…
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post Celebrating the Pioneering Experiments in Genetics
It seems that lately everything in genetics, which has morphed into genomics, is big, big, big. Data on half a million people…