For some, a summer internship is merely a stepping stone into their career. But for Brendan Creemer, a junior biology major at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, a recent summer internship meant so much more. Creemer has Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes progressive vision loss and deafness. He spent much of the summer …

Do certain changes in genes influence a person’s propensity to develop obesity? That’s what researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, home to the Southwest National Primate Research Center, are aiming to find out in a new study. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls U.S. obesity an “epidemic,” with 40% of adults and 19% of …

We all know that proper diet and exercise are supposed to help us maintain a healthy weight. But in some cases, genetics may make it incredibly difficult to keep excess fat away. Texas Biomed researcher Raul Bastarrachea, MD, and the team at Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) recently set out to discover why exactly …

Batten disease is a rare and fatal genetic neurological condition that affects the ability of cells to process waste materials. Those materials build up in brain cells and result in a range of symptoms including seizures, vision loss, motor and speech difficulty, slowed learning and personality changes. Eventually, children with Batten disease become blind, wheelchair-bound …

Learning how the human body makes blood cells could lead to an array of off-the-shelf products for treating cancer and genetic diseases. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health have used human stem cells to make blood-forming cells and demonstrated that they can function as the earliest cells from which …

Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have developed a new form of gene correction that will prevent the transmission of genetic disorders from mother to child, which may lead to a “revolutionary way” to treat inherited diseases. Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his 15-person lab are using a gene-editing technique that involves spindle …

Research from the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) is paving the way for future studies where the possibility of birthing gene-edited monkeys that can serve as models for new therapies is greatly increased. CNPRC scientists efficiently used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to modify the genes of rhesus macaque embryos. Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) is …

Only one individual in history has been cured of HIV. This person is known as “the Berlin patient,” named for the location where the renowned HIV-ridding procedure took place. Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) at OHSU are working to understand how a specific mutation in a gene may block HIV infection …