Focus | June 10, 2005


Contents Therapeutics Neuroscience Social Medicine Neurology Clinical Research Health Care Policy Genetics New Books Education Accolades Medical Ethics Research Briefs Bulletin Forum Related Sites WebWeekly Lab Works StudenTalk Harvard Medical School
	June 10, 2005 THERAPEUTICS: Delivery Technology Paves Way for RNAi Therapies Judy Lieberman, Wayne Marasco, and colleagues have developed a technique to deliver disease-fighting strands of RNA to certain genes within certain cells in the body. The findings, which appeared online May 22 in Nature Biotechnology, promise to speed the development of therapies for cancer, AIDS, and other diseases based on RNA interference.
	NEUROSCIENCE: Gene Clue to Brain Asymmetry Revealed on Right Side Neurobiologists know that language is produced in the left perisylvian cortex and that the region looks different from its counterpart on the right side of the brain. But so far no one has pinpointed how—by the turning on and off of what genes—the two hemispheres have become asymmetric. A team of HMS researchers has done just that, with surprising results. Sun Tao (left), Christopher A. Walsh, and their colleagues compared the expression of genes in the left and right perisylvian cortices at critical moments of human embryonic development. Of the 27 genes they found, many were more highly expressed on the right side than on the left. The study appears in the May 12 online Science.
	SOCIAL MEDICINE: Gun Violence May Be Viewed as Contagious Young teens who witnessed gun violence were more than twice as likely as peers who had not faced this violence to commit a violent crime within the following two years. So says a study in the May 27 Science led by Felton Earls (left) and Jeffrey Bingenheimer. According to Earls, the model that emerges from the data is that of violence as a socially infectious disease.
	NEUROLOGY: Fetal-cell Transplants Reverse Parkinson’s in Two Patients A new study offers evidence that fetal-cell transplants for Parkinson’s disease can work, despite controversy about the treatment. A collaboration between Ole Isacson and a clinical team in Halifax, Nova Scotia, presents the first postmortems of patients who had received a transplant in which individual cells were chemically dissociated before implantation in the brain. The study, published in the May 5 online edition of Brain, showed that the two patients improved clinically without any negative side effects, and an analysis of the brain tissue revealed transplanted cells that survived and produced dopamine.
	CLINICAL RESEARCH: Discord Found in Clinical-trial Contracts In a study of clinical-trial contract provisions that restrict researchers’ control over the trials, Michelle Mello and colleagues show that research administrators who negotiate these contracts with industry sponsors are divided on key issues of confidentiality and of data ownership and dissemination. Writing in the May 26 New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers argue that there should be more transparency in these agreements since their provisions have a critical influence on academic freedom.
	HEALTH CARE POLICY: National Mental Health Survey Shows Mixed Results on Progress The latest national mental-health tracking survey, led by Ron Kessler, indicates that despite the therapeutic advances, increased awareness, and expansion of mental-health coverage since the last survey was taken 10 years ago, a majority of Americans will have a mental health disorder at some time in their life, these disorders frequently go untreated, and the care provided is often inadequate. The findings also suggest that mental disorders gain their strongest foothold among young people. Kessler and colleagues report their research in the June Archives of General Psychiatry.
	GENETICS: Disease Mutation Tracked Down, Ending ‘Curse’ for Colombian Families In about 600 families around the world, mutations in one particular gene give migraines to children, strokes to young adults, and dementia to the middle-aged. There is no treatment. Now, working with several families in Colombia, HMS graduate student Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez (on right) and his collaborators have worked out an early step in the cascade of events leading from the mutated gene to the disease phenotype. The findings were published online April 27 in Human Molecular Genetics and one day may provide molecular insights into more common forms of stroke, said senior author Kenneth Kosik.