A phase I/II gene therapy clinical trial for children suffering from Sanfilippo B syndrome, a rare genetic disease, enrolled a first patient in October of this year.
A team of researchers at Inserm led by Cyril Herry (Inserm Unit 862, “Neurocentre Magendie,” Bordeaux) has just shown that interneurons located in the forebrain at the level of the prefrontal cortex are heavily involved in the control of fear responses. Using an approach combining in vivo recordings and optogenetic manipulations in mice, the researchers succeeded in showing that the inhibition of parvalbumin-expressing prefrontal interneurons triggers a chain reaction...
The largest international study ever conducted on Alzheimer's disease, as part of the IGAP (International Genomics of Alzheimer Project) international consortium, coordinated by the joint research unit comprising Inserm, the Pasteur Institute at Lille-University Lille Nord de France 'Public health and molecular epidemiology of diseases associated with ageing' and LabEx DISTALZ, directed by Philippe Amouyel, has identified eleven new regions of the genome involved in the appearance of this...
How can some people resist the attraction of immediate pleasures and pursue long-term goals, while others easily succumb and compromise their ultimate expectations? One secret factor might lie in the activity of a deep brain structure: the hippocampus.
A team of researchers led by Michel De Waard, Inserm Research Director at the Grenoble Institute of Neurosciences (Inserm, University Joseph Fourier, CNRS), has discovered that an African medicinal plant produces large quantities of molecules with analgesic properties.
A l’occasion de la journée mondiale de la maladie d’Alzheimer qui se tiendra le 21 septembre 2013, le service de presse de l’Inserm vous compile les dernières actualités/avancées sur cette maladie.
A team of researchers from Inserm led by Pierre Szepetowski (INMED: "Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée" combined inserm/ University of Aix-Marseille unit) has just succeeded in identifying a gene whose mutations are responsible for a wide spectrum of epilepsies and epileptic encephalopathies with language dysfunction in children.
Christophe Bernard, Inserm research director, and his team within the "1106 Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes" unit (Inserm/Aix-Marseille University), have recently described certain harmful effects after caffeine consumption by female mice during pregnancy on the brains of their offspring.
Thanks to work carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, Eric Burguière, an Inserm researcher working in the MHI research centre and his co-workers have succeeded in reducing the compulsive behaviour of mice using optogenetics, a technique that combines light stimulation with genetic engineering.
Congenital amusia is a disorder characterized by impaired musical skills, which can extend to an inability to recognize very familiar tunes. The neural bases of this deficit are now being deciphered. According to a study conducted by researchers from CNRS and Inserm at the Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (CNRS / Inserm / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1), amusics exhibit altered processing of musical information in two...