McGill University and GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) have signed a collaboration agreement to develop a potential breakthrough approach to treat cystic fibrosis, a fatal genetic disease. The trans-Atlantic effort between researchers from McGill's Faculty of Medicine and their GSK collaborators in the UK, will focus on developing molecules that could treat the disease by correcting the dysfunction caused by the mutated gene. This revolutionary approach will be a departure from current treatments, which only manage the symptoms or complications of the disorder...

Scientists have found why a certain type of bacteria, harmless in healthy people, is so deadly to patients with cystic fibrosis. The bacterium, Burkholderia cenocepacia, causes a severe and persistent lung infection in patients with CF and is resistant to nearly all known antibiotics. Cystic fibrosis is a chronic disorder ...

By developing software that uses 3-D models of proteins involved in cystic fibrosis, a team of scientists at Duke University has identified several new molecules that may ease the symptoms of the disease. Computer algorithms created by the team predict how well a given molecular structure will block a basic ...

Harvard stem cell researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have taken a critical step in making possible the discovery in the relatively near future of a drug to control cystic fibrosis (CF), a fatal lung disease that claims about 500 lives each year, with 1,000 new cases diagnosed annually...

Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have derived a population of pure lung and thyroid progenitor cells in vitro that successfully mimic the developmental milestones of lung and thyroid tissue formation. The research, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, identifies factors necessary ...

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a devastating disease caused by mutations in the CFTR gene. In Canada, one in every 3,600 children born has the disease. Researchers have long been puzzled as to how individuals who carry the same CFTR mutations can experience such different courses of disease. Patients with CF ...

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers working as part of the International Cystic Fibrosis Consortium have discovered several regions of the genome that may predispose cystic fibrosis (CF) patients to develop an intestinal blockage while still in the uterus. A report of this international study appears online in ...

When it comes to treating cystic fibrosis, the current standard of aggressive antibiotic treatments may not always be the best answer, a decade-long study led by researchers at the University of Michigan has found. Traditionally, bacteria-blasting antibiotics are used to suppress infection in CF patients' lungs to the lowest level ...