Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness for Americans over 60 years of age. It affects more than 14 million people. But how it attacks the macula, the…
Research has shown that leptin is an important hormone with a hand in many metabolic processes. It undoubtedly has widespread effects that may influence diabetes as well as obesity. Recent…
About 16 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, which can cause blindness, kidney failure, and heart disease. Now researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health have linked a diet…
George Demetri, medical director of the Sarcoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was the lead investigator of a clinical study that…
A Harvard research team led by Laurie Glimcher, Irene Heinz Given professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a Harvard Medical School professor of medicine, two…
Researchers are working feverishly to develop an effective vaccine against the AIDS virus. Various vaccines have been tested. One of the more promising vaccine trials involved eight monkeys. When one…
Angiogenesis is the process by which cancer tumors develop a network of blood vessels to feed them, so that they may continue their growth. The strategy that cancer cells use…
Harvard Medical School researchers have discovered that a pigment contained in the egg of the South African claw-toed frog is indispensable for development. Witout the pigment, called biliverdin, which is…
About 2,000 children a year are diagnosed with medulloblastoma, or brain tumor. In a study, researchers examined gene expression patterns from 99 patient tumor samples of three different types of…
Can weight loss decrease heart disease in type 2 diabetes? That’s the question being asked by Harvard researchers and others based at three Boston medical centers. In a nationwide study…
A national clinical trial compared the effects of standard colon cancer surgery with a newer, minimally invasive procedure for removing tumors called laparoscopic surgery. Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and…
The brain’s circadian clock is a tiny cluster of neurons behind the eyes. This cluster of cells sends out signals that control the body’s daily rhythms. New research from Harvard…
“Our focus is to understand the very first few steps that drive a cell to become an intestinal cell instead of a muscle cell,” says Yang Shi, Harvard Medical School…
Broadly defined, statistical genetics is the development of methods to analyze DNA. In recent years, the term has been more specifically applied to gene mapping, or the search for locations…
Brain cells are protected from possible contamination by substances in circulating blood by what is known as “the blood-brain barrier.” Researchers have many questions about precisely how this protective mechanism…
There are differences in the sounds of two voices or two musical instruments even if they hit the same note, and somehow the brain knows that. A new study shows…
A type of disease-fighting cells in the body — T cells — have a reputation for being ever-ready to fight invading infections. But that’s not the way they really work,…
Thirty years ago, Judah Folkman, of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, first developed the idea that cancerous tumors are dependent on the growth of small blood vessels. Since…
It’s a common-sense notion that those who have been abused as children may became drug abusers later in life. But why is this so? Carl Anderson, a Harvard instructor in…
Heart failure develops when the heart stops pumping effectively due to the destruction of muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes. Damage inflicted during a heart attack causes massive loss of cardiomyocytes,…
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Nationwide, there are an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 people with MS. Researchers have long wondered how MS develops…
David Borsook is a Harvard Medical School associate professor of radiology, who both treats patients and conducts research. “Over 15 years of seeing patients with pain it became obvious that…
Now that whole genomes have been sequenced, a group of scientists has geared up for the next phase: identification and classification of newly discovered coding regions. The DNA microchip, developed…
Researchers are beginning to understand how a gene called “stardust” works to set up the basic top-down architecture of the epithelial cells that line the gut, skin, and many other…
Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder caused by a single mutation in the beta-globin gene that results in the substitution of one amino acid. This small error is enough…
Researchers who wondered about the effectiveness of lithium drugs in treating patients with severe depression analyzed 22 studies involving 5,647 patients. The scientists, working at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont,…
There are several controversies surrounding the use of Ritalin, or methylphenidate, a stimulant prescribed for children who have an abnormally high level of activity or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).…
Harvard AIDS Institute researchers in Botswana are trying to help HIV-infected mothers and their infants. In the rural area of Molepolole, where AIDS Institute researcher Shahin Lockman lives and works,…
Using a computer program that compares bits of genetic material taken from tissue in the retinas of mice against records in a huge genetic data base from the mouse and…
To make a protein, a cell’s enzymes typically edit out about 90 percent of the information along the length of a DNA strand that makes up a whole gene. In…
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