Massachusetts Institute of Technology
When cancer is confined to one spot in the body, doctors can often treat it with surgery or other therapies. Much of the mortality associated with cancer, however, is due to its tendency to metastasize, sending out seeds of itself that may take root throughout the body. The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. “These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time,” says Jonathan Weissman, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member.
Now, researchers led by Weissman, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have turned a CRISPR tool into a way to do just that. In a paper published Jan. 21 in Science, Weissman’s lab, in collaboration with Nir Yosef, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and Trever Bivona, a cancer biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, tre
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Just over 200,000 Americans suffer from systemic lupus erythematosus, or SLE, a condition in which the body s immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy tissues, especially joints and skin, a new study shows.
Led by a researcher at NYU Grossman School of the Medicine, the study provides the first national estimate of how widespread the autoimmune disease is since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) set up a half dozen state registries to track the illness more than a decade ago. SLE affects mostly women, can be fatal, and often involves debilitating flare-ups of fatigue and pain that keep nearly half of adult patients from working.