Genotyping provides route to tailored treatment at lower cost with less side effects

A new centralised genotyping service that enables clinicians to differentiate between types of hepatitis C infections is poised to improve treatment for patients with Hepatitis C, a severely under treated viral infection in the UK. The new service, available through HepCgen will allow clinicians to tailor costly interferon-based treatment regimes to the patients’ viral genotype, thus lowering costs a

Expertise derived from working on the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan is now being applied to underground drilling machines. This is providing tunnelling engineers with an improved ability to virtually “see” some 40 metres into solid rock and pinpoint obstacles ahead.

It´s an old miners´ expression: “There is darkness in front of the pick”. Billions of years of geological history has laid down complex folds of strata, patterns of faulting and embed

Bacteria and viruses are completely different classes of pathogens, and not surprisingly the body uses completely different molecular “receptors” to detect them in order to mount an immune defense.

Paradoxically, while the detection systems are different, the actual immune defenses the body employs to clear the system of viral or bacterial infection are much the same. As are the symptoms–to you or me, fighting off bacteria or viruses can produce the same fatigue, inflammation, or hac

A comparison of 754 nearby stars like our sun – some with planets and some without – shows definitively that the more iron and other metals there are in a star, the greater the chance it has a companion planet.

“Astronomers have been saying that only 5 percent of stars have planets, but that’s not a very precise assessment,” said Debra Fischer, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times

A single protein acts as a key switch point in frontline immune system reactions to both bacterial and viral infections, according to a report published online today in the journal Nature. In determining how this protein functions, a team of scientists supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) can now explain why certain symptoms, such as fever, occur regardless of the cause of infection.

Bruce Beutler, M.D., of The Scripps Research Institute in L

Individual genetic differences in drug metabolism in pain medication can lead to severe toxicity or therapeutic failure.

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as an “unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.” The current analgesic strategies for treating chronic pain and cancer pain are based on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 1990 analgesic ladder, in