"We are delighted at this opportunity to join forces with such a high-caliber team of researchers who share our interest in finding answers to some of the most vexing diseases, from lupus to diabetes to various cancers," says James Mandell, M.D., Chief Executive Officer of Children's Hospital Boston.
Whether condoms or abstinence, most efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases have a common logic: keep the pathogen out of your body altogether. While this approach is certainly reasonable enough, it doesn’t help the countless people worldwide who, for a number of reasons, are not in a position to control their sexual circumstances.
Image courtesy of Cell Host & Microbe, Judy Lieberman, January 22, 2009
Pictured: Cholera toxin (red) internalization in several mammalian epithelial cell lines proceeds via vesicles and tubules from the plasma membrane towards the perinuclear endosomal/Golgi area. Representative confocal images from middle sections of cells are shown.
Denisa Wagner, Ph.D., and colleagues have shed light on the regulatory powers of a molecule called CalDAG-GEFI. Pictured: A micrograph of a small, injured blood vessel shows fibrin deposition (dark areas) that prevents leakage of blood into surrounding tissue.
Investigator Judy Lieberman's research is attacking AIDS on a number of fronts. Pictured: HeLa cells that have been treated with the T cell serine protease granzyme A in the presence of the pore forming protein perforin.
It began, as scientific investigations often do, with a tragedy to someone close. Isaac Chiu, PhD, an undergraduate student in biochemistry at Harvard University, learned that a family friend had developed Lou Gehrig’s disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), and was quickly and mysteriously losing muscle strength and control. Devastated, Chiu wanted to know more.
Articles in medical journals gave him the basics: Some 10 percent of ALS cases are inherited; for the rest, the insult that unleashes the disease is unknown. There is no cure, only a handful of supportive treatments. ALS has long been viewed as a neurodegenerative disease, one that exclusively affects motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord.
But as he read more, Chiu saw another possibility. “One of the components, even from the early ALS studies, is inflammation,” he says.
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PCMM/IDI Principal Investigator Judy Lieberman, M.D., Ph.D., and postdoctoral fellow Fabio Petrocca, M.D., have each been awarded FY2008 Research Grants as a part of the Department of Defense's… Read More »
The Cancer Research Institute, Inc. (CRI), a nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to the support and coordination of scientific and clinical efforts that will lead to the immunological treatment,… Read More »