It's a chicken and egg question. Where do the infectious protein particles called prions come from? Essentially clumps of misfolded proteins, prions cause neurodegenerative disorders, such as mad cow/Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, in humans and animals.

A promising gene therapy developed, in part, at Thomas Jefferson University's Center for Translational Medicine to prevent and reverse congestive heart failure is on the verge of clinical trials, after years of proving itself highly effective in the lab and a large animal study.

When the human genome sequence was launched in 2000, it introduced the possibility of personalization in health care.

Doctors have known for a long time that prostate cancer "runs in the family." Men with relatives who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer have an elevated risk of also developing this type of cancer.

There are many kinds of cancers of the immune system, but one, Activated B-Cell Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma, or ABC-DLBCL, is particularly common and pernicious.

Chronic non-communicable diseases (NCD), such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, chronic respiratory disorders and cancer represent the major global health problem of the 21st century and affect all age groups.

After evaluating twin pairs in which at least one child has autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), researchers suggest that the shared environment may play a more substantial role in development of the condition than shared genes do, according to a report published Online First today by Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Scientists have begun to reveal the order of the genetic aberrations in individual cancers in a finding they say is key to early diagnosis and personalized medicine.

A musculoskeletal system so far unknown in the animal world was recently discovered in weevils. The hip of Trigonopterus oblongus does not consist of the usual hinges, but of joints based on a screw-and-nut system.