A paralysed man has been able to walk again after being treated by Polish surgeons at Wroclaw in south-west Poland. According to AFP, two years ago Darek Fidyka underwent two operations in Poland, performed by a team of doctors led by Dr Pawel Tabakow from Wrocław Medical University. This operation was the result of the […]
9 children with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency have received a new form of gene therapy. Alain Fischer, Marina Cavazzana-Calvo and Salima Hacein-Bey-Abina, together with their teams at Inserm Unit 1163 and AP-HP, have just published these results in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1999, these researchers pioneered the treatment by gene therapy of […]
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to two Americans, Eric Betzig and William Moerner, and a German, Stefan Hell, on Wednesday 8 October “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” nanoscopy, as the jury said in its press release. The laureates developed two methods enabling microscopy on a nanometric scale, and hence the […]
The Nobel Prize of physiology or medicine 2014 is awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard I. Moser for their work about for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. May-Britt’s work, conducted with Edvard Moser as a long-term collaborator, includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as […]
What is Ebola virus? Ebola virus is a highly contagious, fatal virus. After 2 to 21 days incubation, the disease appears as non-specific symptoms (fever, tiredness, muscle and joint pain) before developing into a phase characterised by gastro-intestinal signs such as bloody diarrhoea, vomiting, respiratory and sometimes neurological symptoms. In 40% to 80% of cases, […]
The 2014 Lasker Award has just been won by Alim Louis Benabid, Director of Inserm Unit 318 “Preclinical Neurosciences” from 1988 to 2006, and winner of the 2008 Inserm Prix d’Honneur for his work on deep brain stimulation for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.Since 1945, the Lasker Award has distinguished the most brilliant researchers who […]
1) Access to experimental treatment, on a compassionate basis, given the severe spontaneous development of the disease (60% mortality). Who is given priority when administering treatment available in small quantities and under what conditions in the absence of human data? In addition, the ZMapp serum is developed by private pharmaceutical companies, which raises the issue […]
The Ebola epidemic is continuing to spread in West Africa. In March 2014, Guinea was reporting its first cases of the Ebola virus disease to the World Health Organization (WHO). The disease has since spread beyond Guinea’s borders to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Within the past several days, a first case has been reported […]
According to WHO, between 29 May and 1 June 2014, 37 new cases of Ebola fever and 21 deaths were recorded in Guinea, and 13 new cases (no deaths) were recorded in Liberia. The Jean Mérieux BSL-4 Laboratory is a high-level containment laboratory dedicated to the study of class 4 pathogens. The biological safety level applied is 4, […]
Article published in the “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” journal describing complete remission of a 49-year old patient (after more than 6 months) suffering from bone marrow cancer following an injection of a strong dosage of the modified measles virus. The Mayo Clinic researchers have been using this to vaccinate 10 million people. Reach the scientific article Read the […]
In an article published yesterday in the journal Nature, an American team led by Floyd Romesberg (Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California) explains how it succeeded in integrating two new DNA bases into the genetic code of a bacterium. Their breakthrough is that the bacterium retains these genetic modifications during replication. To comment this findings, contact […]
