Genetic overlap in autoimmune disorders

Lindsey Criswell and Corinne Richard-Miceli review risk loci that are shared among autoimmune disorders and how this information might help to explain common disease mechanisms.

An update on stem cell therapeutics

Sarah Crawford presents the highlights and roadblocks of therapeutic applications from the Euroepistem 2011 meeting on 'Epigenomic Programming and Stem Cells for Drug Discovery'.

Side-effects as clinical markers

Miquel Duran-Frigola and Patrick Aloy discuss a new computational approach to systematically exploring novel potential applications of already marketed drugs in distinct therapeutic areas.

PTPN22 expression in rheumatoid arthritis

Genotyping and phenotyping of cells from rheumatoid arthritis patients and healthy controls reveals different patterns of expression for the protein tyrosine phosphatase non-receptor 22 gene.

Lipid biomarkers in schizophrenia

Lipidomic, imaging and neurocognitive analysis of twin pairs reveals lipid biomarkers linked to decreased cognitive speed and potentially increased susceptibility to infection in schizophrenia.

Predicting responses to sunitinib

Ganapathi and Bukowski discuss the advances and pitfalls of a recent study of single nucleotide polymorphisms to predict the activity or toxicity of sunitinib for clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

Hematopoiesis and disease - the zebrafish model

Martin, Moriyama and Zon review the advantages of zebrafish for studying early development of blood cells and highlight recent discoveries using this model that show clinical promise.

Genetic test advertising in the United States

Melanie Myers reviews the impact of advertising and selling of genetic testing direct to consumers on health care providers and asks whether providers are ready to deal with this issue.