Freaking Mice

Scientists have developed many life-saving cures for their mice lovers. This thread will attempt to highlight just some of them.

 

http://guardian.ng/features/new-revolutionary-cancer-vaccine-underway/

I'm curious what the "remarkable" cure rate actually is. Maybe it's just remarkable in the context of something that's just supposed to be a vaccine? Heck a vaccine by itself would be amazing.

That 6M price tag seems too good to be true. We'll see.

I never knew that Africa was the place to go for vaccine trials.

Googling Dr. Koistinaho:

Well, at least mice got a cancer cure.

 

Gene editing reduces hypercholesterolemia in mice.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-researchers-nanotech-gene-editing-cholesterol-gene/4113273.html

U.S. researchers have used nanotechnology plus the powerful CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool to turn off a key cholesterol-related gene in mouse liver cells, an advance that could lead to new ways to correct genes that cause high cholesterol and other liver diseases.

The study, published on Monday in Nature Biotechnology, holds promise for permanently editing genes such as PCSK9, a cholesterol-regulating gene that is already the target of two drugs made by the biotechnology companies Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Amgen.

In tests targeting the PCSK9 gene, the system proved highly effective, eliminating the gene in more than 80 percent of liver cells. The PCSK9 protein made by this gene was undetectable in the treated mice, which also experienced a 35 percent drop in total cholesterol, the researchers reported.

 

Biomarker may signal early Alzheimer's
https://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/alzheimers-biomarker-may-predict-early-onset/81255153

The SBP researchers—publishing their findings today in Nature Communications “Identification of a Peptide Recognizing Cerebrovascular Changes in Mouse Models of Alzheimer’s Disease”—believe their new results could provide a means of homing drugs to diseased areas of the brain to treat AD, Parkinson's disease, as well as glioblastoma, brain injuries, and stroke.

“Our goal was to find a new biomarker for AD," explained co-lead study investigator Aman Mann, Ph.D., a research assistant professor at SBP. "We have identified a peptide (DAG) that recognizes a protein that is elevated in the brain blood vessels of AD mice and human patients. The DAG target, connective tissue growth factor (CTGF), appears in the AD brain before amyloid plaques, the pathological hallmark of AD."

"Importantly, we showed that DAG binds to cells and brain from AD human patients in a CTGF-dependent manner," Dr. Mann noted. "This is consistent with an earlier report of high CTGF expression in the brains of AD patients."

"Our findings show that endothelial cells, the cells that form the inner lining of blood vessels, bind our DAG peptide in the parts of the mouse brain affected by the disease," added senior study investigator Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., distinguished professor at SBP. "This is very significant because the endothelial cells are readily accessible for probes injected into the bloodstream, whereas other types of cells in the brain are behind a protective wall called the blood–brain barrier. The change in AD blood vessels gives us an opportunity to create a diagnostic method that can detect AD at the earliest stage possible.”

The scientists are hopeful that DAG could potentially be used as a tool to improve the delivery of drug or imaging agents to regions of vascular change and astrogliosis in diseases associated with neuroinflammation.

"But first we need to develop an imaging platform for the technology, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) scans to differentiate live AD mice from normal mice. Once that's done successfully, we can focus on humans," Dr. Ruoslahti noted.