Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

Whenever you eat strawberries, does your throat start to swell and itch? Do you also get a burning or prickling sensation in your lips, gums, tongue or inside your cheeks? Or perhaps drinking milk ...

Fourteen pairs of identical twins joined the EU funded medical project “ Fight-MG ”, to fight Myasthenia Gravis . This rare autoimmune disease leads to abnormal fatigability of various skeletal muscles.

Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a rare auto-immune disease—whereby patients’ immune systems attack their own bodies— arising from a breakdown in communications between the nervous and muscular systems.

Collaboration between research groups is key in tackling rare diseases such as auto-immune disease Myasthenia Gravis (MG). Indeed, the rarity of the disease means that it can be difficult to collect enough samples of blood and tissues to perform quality research.

Viruses often get bad press. Likened to Trojan horses they are often associated with disease. But, i t is precisely because of their infectious nature that they can potentially be used as gene vectors - which are vehicles loaded with good copies of malfunctioning genes - and delivered to cells.

Almost every one of our cells has an entire copy of our genome. But only differing subsets of genes are active and expressed in any given cell. Epigenetics is the study of how the activity of our genes is controlled and regulated .

Diseases of the central nervous system are a big burden to society . According to estimates, they cost €800 billion per year in Europe. And for most of them, there is no definitive cure.

Fat, sugar and salt - these ingredients are often used by the food industry to enrich their products and provide us with the perfect sensual experience. Now, scientists in France are trying to reverse this trend.

More than half of all deaths in Europe are caused by cardiovascular disease, and 80% of all these are due to atherosclerosis.

Embryonic or neural stem cells are key tools for future studies on Parkinson’s disease or other degenerative diseases. So far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells implied the destruction of an embryo.

We don’t really seem to know all that much about the organ we all come from.