A senior scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital has developed Canada's first two human embryonic stem cell lines, giving researchers across the country new potential and hope for eventually discovering treatments and cures for many chronic and fatal diseases.

"My hope – and the hope of my world-class laboratory team – is that our step of developing the first Canadian embryonic stem cell lines will ultimately bring Canada and the world closer to treating or curing diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, Diabetes and spinal cord injuries," said Dr. Andras Nagy, a researcher at Mount Sinai's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute.

A team of investigators from the Uppsala Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) and Harvard Medical School has uncovered novel targets for the development of drugs that would potentially complement, or replace, statins in treating heart disease.

Lorus Therapeutics has announced that the EMEA (European Medicines Agency) has given a positive opinion on Lorus' application for orphan drug status to Virulizin, the company's lead anticancer drug for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics (LCB) at Uppsala University in Sweden have developed a new bioinformatics technique for systematically analyzing key regions in DNA that help control gene activity. The cooperative efforts were headed by Krzysztof Fidelis in the United States and by Jan Komorowski in Sweden.

To ignite a life-threatening infection in the body, a virus such as HIV invades body cells by first merging, or fusing, with the cell's outer membrane. Once inside the cell, the invading microbe's genetic material takes over, turning the 'host' cell into a factory to produce more copies of the virus, which then spill out to invade other cells in the body.

A prototype drug created by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago shows promise in slowing replication of the virus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

Currently, there are no effective antiviral agents or vaccines for SARS, which killed almost 800 people in an epidemic in 2002-2003.

Regulators in the US could soon be asked to approve a human trial of gene therapy for cystic fibrosis that uses a hybrid of the HIV and Ebola viruses. Tests on monkeys show the hybrid virus delivers genes to the lungs far more efficiently than any other method developed so far. And while the idea of combining two killer viruses sounds horrifying, the risks should be low.

Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, has long been thought to be important only to translate a gene's DNA into the proteins that are cells' workhorses. But new evidence shows that tiny bits of RNA not used to make proteins actually play central roles in normal biology and in the development of cancers.

Amyloid fibers are best known as the plaque that gunks up neurons in people with neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease--the human analog of mad cow disease. But even though amyloids are common and implicated in a host of conditions, researchers haven't been able to identify their precise molecular structures. Conventional techniques used to image proteins, such as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, don't work with fibrous structures such as amyloids. And scientists depend on these high resolution images of molecules in order to study their function.

It seems a mighty feat for a microscopic fungus built from threadlike filaments. But collectively, these spindly mushroom relatives help move several billion tons of nutrients out of the soil and into plants each year. Now, new Michigan State University-supported research on the movement of nitrogen brings into sharper focus this underground process at the root of nearly all of Earth's food chains.

Vast genetic resources – "blue gold" on the international deep sea floor – need protection from unfettered commercial exploitation, warns a new report from the Japan-based United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS).