Recent news of members of the Vallee Foundation scientific community include two new Nature articles by Young Investigators David Tobin and Feng Zhang (see below) and research from the lab of Vallee Visiting Professor Andreas Strasser at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne where scientists are targeting a cell 'survival' protein that could help treat some lymphomas, including those cancers with genetic defects that make them resistant to many existing therapies.  Read more...

A Nature article on "Genome-scale transcriptional activation by an engineered CRISPR-Cas9 complex" has come from Feng Zhang's (YIA 2013) lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Zhang and his colleagues describe structure-guided engineering of a CRISPR-Cas9 complex to mediate efficient transcriptional activation at endogenous genomic loci. 

Also in Nature this week, David Tobin (YIA 2013) and his colleagues at Duke University Medical Center examine the development and consequences of vascularization of the tuberculous granuloma in the zebrafish–Mycobacterium marinum infection model, which is characterized by organized granulomas with necrotic cores that bear striking resemblance to those of human tuberculosis.  See their letter entitled "Interception of host angiogenic signalling limits mycobacterial growth."