Astronomy: Ready for boarding — finally

HCFA's outpatient PPS: finally ready to roll?

Is cell-free fetal DNA from maternal blood finally ready for prime time?

H prenatal genetic diagnosis for numeric chromosomal abnormalities (trisomy 21) at last reached its desired goal of becoming a definitive test (not a screen)? Can we relegate our invasive diagnostic procedures— chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis—to the museum? The contributions of Bianchi et al1 (see p. 890) and others earlier this year2,3 take us a considerable distance. Of cour...

Therapeutic application of RNAi: is mRNA targeting finally ready for prime time?

With unprecedented speed, RNA interference (RNAi) has advanced from its basic discovery in lower organisms to becoming a powerful genetic tool and perhaps our single most promising biotherapeutic for a wide array of diseases. Numerous studies document RNAi efficacy in laboratory animals, and the first clinical trials are underway and thus far suggest that RNAi is safe to use in humans. Yet subs...

Is the microbe-dementia hypothesis finally ready for a treatment trial?

Could infections really have something to do with disorders that cause dementia? Several chronic diseases, such as peptic ulcer, certain cancers, and autoimmune conditions, have established infectious etiologies, either bacterial or viral, but mainstream cognitive disorder research has not fully considered microbial involvement. Evidence is emerging, but the size of the problem— millions of pat...

FSHD: A Repeat Contraction Disease Finally Ready to Expand (Our Understanding of Its Pathogenesis)

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), was one of the first diseases shown to be caused by an unstable repeat in the early 1990s along with spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA), myotonic dystrophy (DM1), and fragile X mental retardation (FRAXA), where the latter three are caused by genetically expanding trinucleotide repeats [1]. However, FSHD differs considerably from the trinuclo...