University of Florida researchers used gene therapy to restore sight in mice with a form of hereditary blindness, a finding that has bearing on many of the most common blinding diseases. Writing onlin

A little-known antibiotic shows early promise as an anti-cancer agent, inhibiting a gene found at higher-than-normal levels in most human tumors, according to researchers at the University of Illinois

A jumping gene first identified in a cabbage-eating moth may one day provide a safer, target-specific alternative to viruses for gene therapy, researchers say. They compared the ability of the four be

Visionary futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose remarkable ideas on technological progress have been an inspiration for Biosingularity blogs, have a wonderful concise article on biological advances in recent i

In an article appearing online today in the journal Nature Methods, researchers at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) unveil a powerful new tool that will facilitate genetic research and open up new avenues for the clinical treatment of genetic disease.An all-in-one tool like this – efficiently combining techniques that each previously required separate [...]

In a study to be published in the January 2006 issue of Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by a team of scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have devised a novel strategy that uses stem cell-based gene therapy and RNA interference to genetically reverse sickle cell disease (SCD) in human cells. This research is the first [...]

A team of scientists from the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) has identified a key factor in heart development that could help advance gene therapy for treating cardiac disorders.The findings could help cardiac stem cell researchers one day develop strategies for gene and cell- mediated cardiac therapies.Published in the current online edition of the [...]

A gene therapy research team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has developed a new method of signaling therapeutic genes to turn “off” or “on,” a mechanism that could enable scientists to fine-tune genetic- and stem cell-based therapies so that they are safer, more controllable and more effective.Although other similar signaling systems have been developed, the Cedars-Sinai [...]