Argonne
Mercy, Mercy, MRSA
In her 2010 book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, author and self-proclaimed “disease geek” Maryn McKenna charted the steady advance of a treatment-resistant organism which she referred to as a “crisis in many dimensions.” MRSA illustrates “failures of science, failures of the marketplace, and failures of support for research and innovation,” McKenna wrote. Since […]
LabBook June 22, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
The Secret Origin of the Vertebrate Brain
By Rob Mitchum The acorn worm is an eye-less, ear-less invertebrate that lives in the intertidal zone, scavenging food particles from the sand and water. One wouldn’t expect to find the developmental clues for the creation of the vertebrate brain in such a humble creature. But a new study led by a University of Chicago […]
A Nano-Vehicle to Fight Brain Cancer
By Rob Mitchum Treating a brain tumor in a lab dish is easy. Scientists have developed a full arsenal of treatments to kill tumor cells, using natural toxins, chemotherapeutic drugs, and even gene therapy to send them to an early grave. But making those therapies work in the actual setting of the brain is a […]
Evolution and the Unraveling of DNA
By Rob Mitchum In cells, DNA doesn’t often hang out in the long, stretched-out strings you see in science textbooks. Most of the time, it is stored tight in a package called a nucleosome, wound like a ball of yarn around a protein called chromatin. In order for a gene to be “activated,” the stretch […]
A Nasal Path to Migraine Relief
Roughly 30 million Americans suffer from migraines, and as you might expect, there’s a large pharmaceutical market to prevent or stop these debilitating headaches. Drugs such as Imitrex and Verapamil employ different pharmacological modes of action, reducing migraines by adjusting neurotransmitter levels, blocking ion channels, or simulating the body’s natural painkillers. There’s also a less […]
Linkage 7/22: Smarter Dosing and Fossil Diaries
A large portion of medical research is dedicated to designing and testing new and better drugs for treating disease. But what if we could improve treatments with the drugs we already have – and potentially cut costs at the same time? That’s the proposal made in an editorial this week in the Journal of the […]
