Word: thalassemia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...effects of the interloping genes may help provide answers to such fundamental questions as what switches DNA on and off, and how a single cell blossoms into a complex organism like a mouse or a human being. Someday the new technology could yield treatments for diseases such as cancer, thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia. In short, an increasing number of biologists and geneticists agree, the field of transgenic mice is hot. Says Rudolf Jaenisch, a molecular biologist with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.: "Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon because it's such an interesting...
...patients with either sickle-cell anemia or thalassemia, a related blood disorder, showed dramatic improvement after receiving butyrate injections for two to three weeks. Apparently the chemical reactivates a gene that produces a form of hemoglobin used by the baby in the womb but shuts down soon after birth. Turned on again, the gene directs the manufacture of enough fetal hemoglobin to compensate for the defective adult variety...
...implanting resulting embryos in the mother's womb. The main difficulty is that only one in ten tries results in a birth. Yet the success rate may improve, and prefertilization diagnosis could someday be used to intercept defective genes that cause such diseases as Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and thalassemia...
...When the retrovirus invaded a marrow cell, it would insert itself into the cellular DNA, as retroviruses are wont to do, carrying the good gene with it. Reimplanted in the marrow, the altered marrow cells would take hold and multiply, churning out the previously lacking protein and curing the thalassemia patient...
...Sweden, researchers have performed fetal-brain-cell transplants to rid rats of Parkinson's disease, a progressive and hitherto incurable neural disorder. In the U.S. and elsewhere, fetal-cell experiments with animals have shown promise of treatments for a host of other human disorders, ranging from blood diseases like thalassemia to paralysis caused by spinal-cord damage. Says Neurosurgeon Barth Green of the University of Miami: "This field isn't growing, it's exploding...