Cambridge scientists have grown ‘mini-guts’ in the lab to help understand Crohn’s disease, showing that ‘switches’ that modify DNA in gut cells play an important role in the disease and how it presents in patients.
A baby girl born deaf can hear unaided for the first time, after receiving gene therapy when she was 11 months old at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
Researchers have discovered that misreading of therapeutic mRNAs by the cell’s decoding machinery can cause an unintended immune response in the body. They have identified the sequence within the mRNA that causes this to occur and found a way to prevent ‘off-target’ immune responses to enable the safer design of future mRNA therapeutics.
Studies of a ‘future-proof’ vaccine candidate have shown that just one antigen can be modified to provide a broadly protective immune response in animals. The studies suggest that a single vaccine with combinations of these antigens – a substance that causes the immune system to produce antibodies against it – could protect against an even greater range of current and future coronaviruses.
In 2017, Ninja Theory, advised by Cambridge academic Professor Paul Fletcher, took the gaming world by storm with Hellblade, which accurately depicted psychosis. Now the company has teamed up with one of Fletcher’s PhD students to see whether gaming might help improve people’s mental health.
GE Healthcare, the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals have agreed to collaborate on developing an application aiming to improve cancer care, with Cambridge providing clinical expertise and data to support GE Healthcare’s development and evaluation of an AI-enhanced application that integrates cancer patient data from multiple sources into a single interface.
Cambridge scientists have identified 200 approved drugs predicted to work against COVID-19 – of which only 40 are currently being tested in COVID-19 clinical trials.
Three companies, Astex Pharmaceuticals, Eisai Ltd and Eli Lilly and Company, are joining forces with research scientists across Cambridge to explore promising new approaches to the treatment of neurodegenerative disease.
Scientists have made a promising step towards developing a new drug for treating acute myeloid leukaemia, a rare blood disorder. In a study published today in Nature, Cambridge researchers report a new approach to cancer treatment that targets enzymes which play a key role in translating DNA into proteins and which could lead to a new class of cancer drugs.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have shown in animal studies that gene therapy may help repair some of the damage caused in chronic neurodegenerative conditions such as glaucoma and dementia. Their approach demonstrates the potential effectiveness of gene therapy in polygenic conditions – that is, complex conditions with no single genetic cause.
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