Delivery Method Could Eventually Help Correct Mutations That Cause Hearing Loss
Most people probably think of viruses as villains that bring illnesses like measles, HIV, and the flu, but some viruses are proving to be valuable allies in the fight against genetic diseases. In a new study, a team of scientists from the NIH IRP and their colleagues showed the promise of a lab-designed virus for delivering gene therapies aimed at correcting hereditary hearing loss.
I've spent the last couple months scouring the NIH archives for the most interesting trivia tidbits I could find. Now you can entertain your colleagues and friends with these 10 fun facts about NIH!
1) Native Americans camped along the stream on the east side of campus beginning about 3,000 years ago. They left choppers, arrow heads, and other material evidence behind.
Potential biomarker may contribute to personalized treatments
Until recently, medical treatment has largely been one-size-fits-all, with doctors unable to separate patients into distinct groups that might benefit more or less from a particular approach. However, researchers are increasingly finding that individuals with the same disease can differ markedly in ways that might one day influence their care. A recent IRP study has identified a particular molecule that may have just such an impact for patients with damaged lungs.
Virtually all parents would agree that having kids is a massive undertaking, and not just after they’re born. Many couples struggle to conceive, and each year thousands of American women experience complications when giving birth. With the help of the NIH’s state-of-the-art supercomputer, Biowulf, IRP senior investigator Rajeshwari Sundaram, Ph.D., develops and refines statistical tools that can guide prospective parents and their doctors through these challenges.
“That machine? You’re gonna have to get up close and personal with it,” Josh, my fellow postbac, told me. I looked at this small metal contraption and nodded, trying to appear as if I understood, while thinking: he just means that people spend so much time sectioning organs on the microtome that it’s like spending an extended amount of time with a loved one, right?
Fast forward a few days, and I find myself breathing warm, moist air onto a paraffin-embedded mouse lung to soften the wax, just before I slice four-micrometer sections of mouse lung tissue that will later be stained and examined under a microscope. “He wasn’t kidding,” I muttered.
While many people think staving off aging means drinking seaweed smoothies and swallowing fish oil supplements, the key to extending life increasingly appears to be not putting things in our mouths. In yet another example of the anti-aging powers of eating less — what scientists call caloric restriction — IRP researchers have identified the specific aging-induced cellular and molecular changes in arteries that are curbed by substantially reducing calorie intake.
For Americans and others living outside the tropics, a mosquito bite is nothing more than an itchy inconvenience, but for billions of others, it can lead to a life-or-death battle with malaria. In some cases, the illness can wreak havoc on the brain. A new IRP study has used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to demonstrate that an investigational therapy can reverse that damage in mice.
We recently sat down with a handful of NIH IRP researchers and support staff to talk about what it’s like to work in the IRP. These meetings between mostly strangers who work at the same massive research campus near Washington, D.C., highlight a wonderful quality of the IRP: Everywhere you go, there are numerous other people who share a love of science and a drive to improve human health, yet also come from markedly different backgrounds and offer wide-ranging perspectives. IRP researchers who reach out to learn from their diverse colleagues and share their thoughts and experiences often find new collaborators and other rewards.
The waning weeks of 2018 were busy ones in the Office of NIH History. We're constantly receiving and cataloguing new donations of historic equipment, images, publications, and more. It’s time to see what our donors have given us lately!
"I thought why could you not invert the concept? Instead of laying down hundreds or thousands of probes, how about laying down hundreds or thousands of tissue spots and probing them one antibody or gene probe at a time," remembers Dr. Juha Kononen of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) about his idea that led to this prototype manual microarray. Tissue array technology performs rapid molecular profiling of hundreds of normal and pathological tissue specimens or cultured cells. Dr. Kononen worked with Drs. Olli Kallioniemi and Stephen B. Leighton to design this tissue microarray which was initially used in the Cancer Genomics Branch. Now, the National Cancer Institute's Tissue Array Research Program (TARP) develops and distributes multi-tumor tissue microarray slides to cancer researchers based on this technology. The quote comes from a 2002 article published in The Scientist.
Science is a process of trial and error. Most successful research publications are preceded by at least a few false starts and perhaps weeks or even months of tinkering to get experiments to work. For IRP senior investigator Carson Chow, Ph.D., this process of testing and throwing out one potential solution after another is an essential part of his research, so much so that he may go through thousands of iterations before arriving at one that works. However, rather than test each approach himself, he leverages the IRP’s considerable computing power to considerably accelerate the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
