is a daily summary made from the selected links I post on Twitter. It is in a bullet points format with links to the original sources which include 350 RSS feeds that produce about 2,500 items per day:

Coffee May Have Some Health Perks, but Can Brew Trouble in People With Certain Conditions. Coffee is the second most widely traded commodity in the world, after oil http://bit.ly/7SpcHy

Zinc Fingers May be a New Way to Edit DNA and Give Hope for Gene Therapy. Zinc fingers can be deployed as a word processing system for cutting and pasting genetic text (DNA) http://bit.ly/6eATaP

“A burger or fried chicken with a side of diabetes?” How fast food increases BMI and diabetes risk:  Women who ate fast food burgers or fried chicken twice a week were 40-70% more likely to develop type 2 dia…

Brandeis University selected Jay and Maureen Neitz, the husband-and-wife team whose pioneering research may lead to the use of gene therapy to treat vision disorders, as the inaugural recipients of the Jay Pepose ‘75 Award in Vision Sciences. The award is funded by a $1 million endowment established this year through a gift from Brandeis graduates Jay Pepose ‘75 and Susan K… (Source: Eye Health / Optometry News From Medical News Today)

Human Gene Therapy , Vol. 0, No. 0. (Source: Human Gene Therapy)

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 9, 22 (2010). doi:10.1038/nrd3085

Gene therapy (Source: Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

Gene therapy offers a novel approach for the treatment of experimental stroke. The adeno-associated virus (AAV) mediated vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) gene transfer into the ischemic brain is described in detail in this chapter. Other methods are also illustrated here, including the generation of mouse middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model, injection of viral vector into mouse brain, and standard assays for determining the successes of brain ischemia and gene transfer. (Source: Springer protocols feed by Neuroscience)

Virus-mediated gene therapies against brain tumors have been limited by the difficulty in tracking glioma cells infiltrating the brain parenchyma. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are particularly attractive cells for clinical use in cell-based therapies because they have tumor-targeting properties, can be easily isolated and expanded to the numbers required for use, and can be genetically manipulated with viral vectors. In addition, most of the replication-deficient adenoviral vectors that have been used to transduce MSCs are based on human Ad serotype 5 (Ad5). However, transduction of MSCs by conventional Ad5 vectors is inefficient, even when very high multiplicities of infection are used because MSCs do not express the cellular coxsackie-adenovirus receptor. This chapter describes in detai…

Limitation of drug delivery to the central nervous system (CNS) is a major problem in development of successful treatment of CNS disorders. Concepts of blood–brain barrier (BBB), its role in transport of various substances from the blood to the brain, as well as strategies to deliver drugs across the BBB have evolved over the past century. This chapter is an overview of the challenges and various approaches to drug delivery in CNS disorders as an introduction to other chapters, which deal with laboratory and clinical methods of CNS drug delivery. A classification of current strategies for drug delivery across the BBB is presented. These include novel formulations of drugs such as nanoparticles and strategies to cross the BBB. Drugs can be introduced directly into the CNS and various …

In the treatment of central nervous system diseases, therapeutic particles need to breach the blood–brain barrier (BBB) to reach their intended target, and it has long been known that this is a difficult barrier to breach. The barrier is both passive with tight junctions hindering passage of even rather small molecules, as well as active with transporters that can pump select molecules back into the bloodstream. The diseases include both those where this barrier has been compromised such as brain tumors, hemorrhagic stroke, and neurotrauma; as well as neurodegenerative disorders where the compromise is substantially less and often unnoticeable. In addition to the pharmaceutical solution which involves design of small molecules that may be administered orally or at least systemically,…

Baculoviruses are ubiquitous insect viruses well known for their use as bioinsecticides, gene therapy vectors, and protein expression systems. Overexpression… (Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)