Health & Medicine Consortium identifies genome regions that could influence severity of cystic fibrosis
| Consortium identifies genome regions that could influence severity of cystic fibrosis |
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| Monday, May 23, 2011 | |
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A team of researchers, including a number from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, have pinpointed regions of the genome that contribute to the debilitating lung disease that is the hallmark of cystic fibrosis. Their findings provide insight into the causes of the wide variation in lung disease severity experienced by CF patients. It also points the way to new diagnostic markers and therapeutic approaches for this and more common lung diseases such as COPD. This study, which appears online Sunday, May 22, 2011 in the journal Nature Genetics, is among the first reported genome-wide scans of a single gene disorder. It was the work of the North America CF Gene Modifier Consortium, which brought together dozens of investigators from the United States and Canada to identify which regions of the genome are associated with lung disease severity in almost 3,500 CF patients. For full release |