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Researchers have discovered that an existing cancer drug could have potential as a treatment for muscular dystrophy. The researchers found that the drug—known as a colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) inhibitor—helped slow the progress of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in mice by increasing the resiliency of muscle fibers. "This is a class of drug that is already being used in clinical trials to treat rare forms of cancer," says Dr. Farshad Babaeijandaghi. Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a severe genetic disorder that leads to progressive muscle weakness and degeneration. "While this is not a cure, it could significantly delay disease progression,...

New research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Center seeks to turn the human body into a genetically engineered cancer-killing machine. The fact that the human body doesn't see cancer as a threat to be destroyed naturally is part of what makes treating it so difficult, so this research uses a harmless, HIV-like virus as the vehicle to carry T-cells (which fight disease) to lymphocytes, and simultaneously carry a reporter gene, which show up in positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, as you can see in the photographs above. So far the researchers have injected the cells into the bloodstreams of melanoma-infected mice, and they...