Results from the first clinical trial of a therapeutic cancer vaccine combining the synthetic bacterial DNA sequence, CpG 7909 (ProMuneTM, Coley Pharmaceutical), with a peptide antigen were reported today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The paper shows that the CpG 7909 DNA sequence is safe, and increases the immune system's ability to recognize and destroy cancer cells. The Phase I study was conducted by the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) at the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, in the framework of the international Cancer Vaccine Collaborative (CVC), a partnership established by the New York-based Cancer Research Institute (CRI) and the LICR.

In 1995, the first complete bacterial genome sequence was published. Now, nearly 200 bacterial genomes have been completed, and a new one hits the scientific press most weeks. This burgeoning industry is not just scientific “stamp collecting,” however. Having all these genome sequences may provide useful clues about why some bacteria cause human disease, how to control their spread, and how to treat the infections caused by them. By comparing genome sequences, scientists can learn much more about what makes a bacteria tick than they can learn from a single sequence.

Neurofibromatosis can leave its patients miserable and debilitated with chronic itching or pain from disfiguring tumors. Infants affected by the disease face possible paralysis or damage to the brain and other organs.

The disease frustrates doctors because there's no effective treatment even though the responsible gene was identified more than a decade ago. Currently little can be done to treat a disease that affects more people than cystic fibrosis, hereditary muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease and Tay Sachs combined.

Now, however, research by IU School of Medicine scientist D. Wade Clapp, M.D., and his colleagues David A. Ingram, Jr., M.D. and Feng-Chun Yang, M.D., Ph.D., have identified a promising target to treat the symptoms of neurofibromatosis. They hope to begin preliminary testing in humans by the end of this year, and are experimenting with potential drug compounds now.

Biologists at Lehigh University and the University of Maryland have identified a cricket living in Hawaii's forests as the world's fastest-evolving invertebrate.

Finicky mating behavior appears to be the driving force behind the speedy speciation of the Laupala cricket, the scientists wrote in the Jan. 27 issue of Nature magazine.

Females in the Laupala genus detect tiny differences in the pulse rates of male courtship songs, which differ from one Laupala species to the next. They refuse to mate with males of other species, thus promoting the formation of new species.

The scientists say their findings shed light on the role of individual choices in the evolution of species and the growth of biodiversity.

Two Virginia Tech scientists contributed by invitation to an international scientific meeting called by Abdoulaye Wade, president of Senegal, to identify strategies for the control of the ongoing locust outbreak in West Africa. Last year, locusts stripped fields of crops and trees of foliage across several countries, causing severe income and food supply loss.

Larry Vaughan, associate program director of the USAID-funded Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research Support Program (IPM CRSP) and research associate in the Office of International Research, Education, and Development (OIRED), and Foster Agblevor, associate professor of biological systems engineering, traveled to Senegal to speak about their biopesticide research at the "International Scientific Seminar on Desert Locusts" held in Dakar in January.

A University of Alberta and Capital Health surgeon, well known for his pioneering work in developing the Edmonton Protocol treatment for diabetes, has taken another important step in the fight against diabetes.

On January 19, at Kyoto University Hospital, Dr. Koichi Tanaka and Dr. James Shapiro, along with a team of Japanese surgeons, removed part of a 56-year-old woman's pancreas. Dr. Shinichi Masumoto then isolated the living islets in the Kyoto Centre for Cell and Molecular Therapy. Under Dr. Shapiro's supervision, the team then transplanted the insulin-producing cells into the woman's 27-year-old diabetic daughter.

If you're a cat fancier, you're well aware that hair follicles are expendable. The product of a spontaneous mutation that caught a cat breeder's eye, le chat nu, would quickly succumb in the wild—its winter coat consists of little more than a ridge of fur down the midback and tail—and needs special care to thrive as a pet. Hairless animals in the lab, on the other hand, can be very instructive. Understanding how hair develops sheds light on the fundamental processes that generate a wide range of tissues and organs, including the lungs, cornea, and mammary glands.

How complex, three-dimensional structures emerge from single sheets of cells is a fundamental question in developmental biology. The dispensability of hair follicles makes them the perfect model system for studying this question—specifically, how structures and organs develop from buds. In a new study, Elaine Fuchs and colleagues use a three-pronged approach—involving gene expression analysis, transgenic mice, and cell cultures—to study how epithelial buds, the precursors of hair follicles, form. Their experiments point to two key actors in a signaling pathway that molds a targeted cluster of cells into a hair bud.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) can be an unpredictable disease. It develops when the body's immune system attacks healthy nerve cells and disrupts normal nerve signaling. Patients experience a wide range of symptoms—including tingling, paralysis, pain, fatigue, and blurred vision—that can appear independently or in combination, sporadically or persistently. Although symptoms appear in no particular order, flare-ups are common in the majority of patients.

MS flare-ups are commonly treated with beta-interferon. Adverse effects are not uncommon, and, more importantly, a sizable proportion of patients show a reduced response, or no response at all. Given the variability of the disease and treatment response, being able to predict how a particular patient is likely to respond to interferon would help doctors decide how close to monitor the patient or even whether to consider alternative treatments. In a new study, Sergio Baranzini et al. describe a computational model that can predict a patient's therapeutic response to interferon based on their gene expression profiles.