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.

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.

The human genome and those of several other organisms have been mapped. But it is proteins that perform the majority of biological functions within every organism .

More than ten years ago, scientists completely mapped the human genome. Now, the attention has turned to enumerating the entire human protein set. Proteins are of interest because they carry out most chemical activities in a cell.

In the battle against malaria researchers at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) have developed a new eco repellent that stops mosquitoes from attacking humans.

AIDS research has attempted many strategies to tackle the HIV virus infection. Now, a new type of vaccine developed within an EU-funded project, called EuroNeut-41 , is based on one of the envelope proteins of the HIV virus , called the gp41 protein.

Professor Markus Affolter is in charge of a zebra fish embryo study researching angiogenesis, which means the recruitment of new blood vessels as a normal process in growth and development, but also as an essential component of tumours’ metastatic pathway.

He made sense of something Darwin was at pains to speculate about, but couldn’t quite argue persuasively.

The main thing about reaching a ripe old age seems to be about cracking the nut of those diseases affecting organ systems deriving substantially or exclusively from mesodermal cells, such as heart, vascular system, blood, kidneys, skeleton and musculature.

Since his seminal 1994 discovery of the Pax-6 gene as the universal master switch of eye formation, Professor Walter Gehring had to prove his point by expressing the mouse gene on the wings and legs of the fruit fly.