Protein Folding News and Research

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Researchers identify gene mutation for that is essential for correct protein-processing in cells

A Jackson Laboratory research team led by Professor Patsy Nishina, Ph.D., has identified a mutation in a gene that's essential for correct protein-processing in cells. Defects in protein folding are associated with a variety of abnormalities and diseases.

10 Jan 2011

Researchers to identify protein-recycling mechanism of TB bacteria

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a key difference in the way human cells and Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB, deliver unwanted proteins marked with a "kiss of death" sequence to their respective cellular recycling factories.

18 Oct 2010

Mystery of arsenite solved

Scientists have solved an important mystery about why an arsenic compound, called arsenite, can kill us, and yet function as an effective therapeutic agent against disease and infections. According to new research published in the October 2010 issue of Genetics scientists from Johns Hopkins, Baylor and Stanford discovered that arsenite, a common water contaminant in many parts of the world, affects a special protein folding machine in yeast, called TCP, also present in humans.

14 Oct 2010

Scientists identify mutant protein in type 2 diabetes

University of Michigan scientists have identified events inside insulin-producing pancreatic cells that set the stage for a neonatal form of non-autoimmune type 1 diabetes, and may play a role in type 2 diabetes as well. The results point to a potential target for drugs to protect normally functioning proteins essential for producing insulin.

13 Oct 2010

ASM awards UTHealth student 3-year, $33,000 fellowship for study of molecular details of protein folding in cells

Jennifer Abrams, a graduate student at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), has been awarded a three-year, $33,000 fellowship from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) to support her innovative research into the molecular causes of protein misfolding diseases like Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and Parkinson's.

21 Sep 2010

NIH awards $1.2 million EUREKA grant to study protein misfolding

Three University of Massachusetts Amherst scientists have received a four-year, $1.2 million EUREKA grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study folding and misfolding of secretory proteins in the cell's protein factory, the endoplasmic reticulum, where misfolding can lead to diseases such as cystic fibrosis and liver cirrhosis.

3 Sep 2010

Pfizer enters agreement to acquire FoldRx Pharmaceuticals

Pfizer Inc. and FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately held drug discovery and clinical development company, today announced that they have entered into an agreement under which Pfizer will acquire FoldRx.

2 Sep 2010

Foldit players to focus on designing novel proteins

Computer scientists and biochemists at the University of Washington two years ago launched an ambitious project harnessing the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems. The game, Foldit, turns one of the hardest problems in molecular biology into a game a bit reminiscent of Tetris. Thousands of people have now played a game that asks them to fold a protein rather than stack colored blocks or rescue a princess.

5 Aug 2010

Researchers develop computer program to accurately simulate protein folding

All proteins self-assemble in a fraction of the blink of an eye, but it can take a long time to mimic the process. And there has been no guarantee of success, even with the most powerful computers - until now.

8 Jul 2010

UCSB physicists create microscopic device to help biologists understand protein folding

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have created a microscopic device to assist biologists in making very fast molecular measurements that aid the understanding of protein folding. This development may help elucidate biological processes associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Since proteins in the body perform different functions according to their shape, the folding process is considered a key area of study.

18 Jun 2010

Scientists make water-free liquid from blood protein

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered a way to make a highly concentrated water-free liquid of a key blood protein, myoglobin, opening up the possibility of new types of biomedical materials.

6 Jun 2010

ADDF awards $210,300 to Amicus Therapeutics to evaluate PCs for treating Alzheimer's disease

The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation announced today that it has awarded a grant of $210,300 to Amicus Therapeutics (Cranbury, NJ) to evaluate small-molecule, orally delivered pharmacological chaperone compounds as a novel approach for treating Alzheimer's disease.

7 May 2010

New research may help advance treatment strategies for common liver disease

A research article published in the journal PloS Pathogens could lead to improvements in the production of vaccines for hepatitis A, the most widespread viral disease in the world.

26 Mar 2010

Supercomputer receives powerful supercomputer for biomedical and life sciences research from IBM

Rice University and IBM today unveiled a new high-performance computing initiative for biomedical and life sciences research that features one of the most powerful supercomputers in the Texas Medical Center. Rice scientists will use the supercomputer in collaboration with researchers from across the medical center to study cancer, AIDS and other complex diseases.

2 Mar 2010

TUM biophysicists map changes in energy landscape of zipper-like protein molecule

Biophysicists at TUM, the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, have published the results of single-molecule experiments that bring a higher-resolution tool to the study of protein folding. How proteins arrive at the three-dimensional shapes that determine their essential functions - or cause grave diseases when folding goes wrong - is considered one of the most important and least understood questions in the biological and medical sciences.

20 Jan 2010

HSF1A stimulates more protein chaperones and reduces protein misfolding

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have found some compounds that improve a cell's ability to properly "fold" proteins and could lead to promising drugs for degenerative nerve diseases, including Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

20 Jan 2010

Scientific societies to hold Experimental Biology 2010 meeting

Six scientific societies announced they will hold their annual meeting, Experimental Biology (EB 2010; www.experimentalbiology.org), April 24-28, 2010 in Anaheim, CA. The societies are the American Association of Anatomists (AAA), American Physiological Society (APS), American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP), American Society for Nutrition (ASN) and American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET).

9 Jan 2010

Proteostasis Therapeutics enters into exclusive license agreement with New York University

Proteostasis Therapeutics announced today that it has entered into an exclusive license agreement with New York University for intellectual property related to discoveries from the laboratory of David Ron, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Julius Raynes Professor of Cell Biology at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine.

8 Jan 2010

Research may point to more effective therapeutic targets for prion diseases

Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have determined for the first time that prions, bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA that can cause fatal neurodegenerative disease, are capable of Darwinian evolution.

4 Jan 2010

Modulating PN aggregase pathway may offer hope for Alzheimer’s disease

Proteostasis Therapeutics announced today that modulating a key Proteostasis Network (PN) pathway may offer a novel approach to Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that was published in the journal Cell by its scientific founders Andrew Dillin, Ph.D., and Jeffery Kelly, Ph.D. The publication describes how regulation of an aggregase pathway reduced the neurodegenerative effects of beta amyloid aggregates that are a hallmark of the disease.

16 Dec 2009