To support the newly launched Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium (BGTC), the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) has released multiple opportunities for researchers, clinicians, and patient advocates to contribute to the work of the consortium. Two Requests for Proposals (RFPs) have been announced. The BGTC is seeking high-throughput screens or other promising developments to optimize individual steps of the adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector generation and human gene expression pathways. The AAV Vector Generation RFP is available here. The AAV Gene Expression RFP is available here. The BGTC Steering Committee also seeks information on rare diseases

Dear Colleagues, Today, the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), eight pharmaceutical companies and five non-profit organizations have partnered to further our understanding of the cellular and molecular disease pathways in autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases.

NIH researchers reveal new insights about the relationship between hair and hair follicles and the skin’s immune system.

Dear Colleagues, From the Hippocratic corpus, the author writes, “I consider the responsibility of medicine to be to entirely relieve the suffering of the sick and to blunt the extremities of disease” (The Art 3.4-7)1. Note that despite the acknowledgment that disease may only be blunted, in promoting health it is our duty to relieve suffering wherever possible.

A researcher from Stanford University asked IRP investigator Michael Ombrello, M.D., to help her team follow a new lead in the mystery of why some patients with a rare inflammatory condition called Still’s disease were coming down with a life-threatening lung ailment.

Using images of cells from mice, Dr. Glancy and his lab showed that myofibrils are actually not made of individual pieces lying side by side. Instead, they actually have little connections where the tubes branch off or split and connect to adjacent ones.

Adeline Chin, a postbaccalaureate research fellow, is searching for proteins present at abnormally high or low levels in the blood of kids with a rare autoimmune illness.

Although the drugs have been around for more than 70 years, scientists have a poor understanding of how glucocorticoids regulate the immune system and the mechanisms by which they cause toxicity in different organs.