Word: cures
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...irreversible procedure is just one of many therapies, both surgical and pharmacological, that Parkinson's patients have tried over the years to control the tremors, rigidity and other symptoms that characterize the disease. All the treatments offer some relief, but none can remotely be called a cure. Now that may be changing. The further scientists peer into the human genome, the more they are uncovering the secrets of Parkinson's--and the more they are becoming convinced that next-generation drugs may at last be able to beat back the disease. What's more, the benefits may not be limited...
...hunt for a Parkinson's cure got a boost in 1997 when researchers discovered a handful of patients whose alpha-synuclein genes had mutated. This might seem like open-and-shut evidence that the cause of the illness had been found, except that the vast majority of Parkinson's patients, whose brains also grow gummed up, do not carry the mutation. Still, scientists believe that the bad gene is a powerful clue. "There appear to be more clumps in the brains of people with the mutant gene," says Zigmond. "Learning how the protein functions may help us develop drugs that...
...radioactive dye and genetic material from a range of human tissue types--from normal, healthy cells to diseased cells representing breast, prostate, lung or colon cancer. Emerging from this experiment will be a set of data points, glowing with eerie phosphorescence, that may someday lead scientists to a new cure for one of the deadliest scourges known...
...easy to design drugs that choose their targets this efficiently. In fact, it's so difficult that drug companies have hardly ever tried. They have relied instead on trial and error, testing hundreds of potential drugs in animals to find a few that actually cure without killing. But these molecular crapshoots are terribly wasteful, which is why drug designers are today turning to a fast-growing new area of computer science known as bioinformatics to fuel their endless quest for newer drugs and better targets...
...starting to turn to the lesser known autoimmune diseases. Remicade, for example, is used to alleviate the intestinal inflammation caused by Crohn's disease, and drugs against the potentially systemic disorders scleroderma and Sjogren's syndrome are well along in clinical trials. None of these treatments is a cure, of course, but anything that can put the brakes on a runaway immune system has to be considered a good start...