An international team of researchers, led by scientists at University of California San Diego and Shiley Eye Institute at UC San Diego Health, has broadened and deepened understanding of how inherited retinal dystrophies (IRDs) affect different populations of people and, in the process, have identified new gene variants that may cause the diseases. The findings […]
One way to make health care more personalized is to use a person's DNA sequence — or genome — to predict their risk of disease. But as the field of precision medicine grows, so have concerns that we may be leaving a large fraction of Americans out. Disease prevalence and severity can vary considerably across […]
In March of 2020, thousands of scientists around the world united to answer a pressing and complex question: what genetic factors influence why some COVID-19 patients develop severe, life-threatening disease requiring hospitalization, while others escape with mild symptoms or none at all? A comprehensive summary of their findings to date, published in Nature, reveals 13 […]
A team of scientists from the University of California Santa Cruz, USA, recently identified a novel variant (B.1.x) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that might be circulating in at least 20 US states and six countries globally. The mutations found in this variant are also present in other known variants of concern […]
Evolutionary ecology theory offers avenues to anticipate the future behavior of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pathogen. The repeated emergence of more infectious and possibly more virulent variants of SARS-CoV-2 shows that the virus is adapting under selective pressure. Although there has been a lot of discussion on how biodiversity-related events facilitate […]
The emergence of a novel human coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. SARS-CoV-2 causes the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a heterogeneous disease. Due to its rapid spread across the world within a short period, by March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared […]
New York has the first case of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant called B.1.526, picked up by genomic surveillance research from Columbia University. The findings come after reports of other variants have been reported worldwide — B.1.1.7 in the United Kingdom, B.1.351 in South Africa, and P.1/P.2 in Brazil. If […]
A commercially available genomic test may help oncologists better determine which patients with recurrent prostate cancer may benefit from hormone therapy, according to new research from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and 15 other medical centers. Researchers studied prostate cancer samples from 352 participants in the NRG/RTOG 9601 clinical trial, which compared radiation therapy […]
Anecdotal reports claim that the incidence of cancer in sharks is very low, but there is not enough data to confirm this estimate categorically. A study published in the journal Genomics, however, presents strong evidence of anti-tumor activity in the genome of the Shortfin mako shark, Isurus oxyrinchus. This large pelagic species, which can be […]
Five years ago, the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group (ECOG-ACRIN) and National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, jointly launched a very different kind of cancer study. NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH or EAY131), the largest precision medicine cancer trial to date, sought to match genetic abnormalities driving patients’ tumors with […]
