Heena Sharma Blog

Jennie Wilklow's daughter Anna has a strange condition. Minutes after she was born via C-section, the newborn's skin began to thicken and crack, creating fissures across her body. Speaking to People magazine, Wilklow said that out of the womb, her daughter's skin became dry and hard, like armour. Wilklow remembers the shock among hospital staff as Anna's eyes swelled shut and circulation in her hand and feet were cut off. It turns out that Anna was born with harlequin ichthyosis, a rare condition that causes newborns to form thick plates of skin, according to the First Skin Foundation . According to experts, the hardening of the skin can dramatically affect an infant's appearance and cause their lips and eyelids to turn inside out. The condition further creates constriction around their chest and makes it difficult to breathe and eat. Read More Business Standard

Last month, Strand Life Sciences, a Bengaluru-based specialty diagnostic company, bought the India operations of US-based medical diagnostic company, Quest Diagnostic. The takeover created ripples in the medical diagnostic industry in India. Quest had set shop some ten years ago and has an established routine testing business with many corporate clients. Strand is actually a spinoff from IISc Bangalore as a bioinformatics company. It bought out HCG’s diagnostic business in January, with a focus on oncology testing and now with Quest, it is emerging as a sophisticated end-to-end operator. The Quest acquisition offers a new service line, of routine testing, which is 80-90 per cent of the diagnostic market. The deal could make Strand a leader in the testing business. “Quest's corporate wellness testing and women health segments are stronger than ours. Our oncology, advanced diagnostics and genomics are stronger. Quest was stronger in the north, we are strong in the sout...

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life. If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics. A US scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes. Many mainstream scientists think it's too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation. The researcher, He Jiankui of Shenzhen, said he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments, with one pregnancy resulting thus far. He said his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease, but to try to bestow a trait that few people naturally have an ability to resist possible future infection with HIV , the AIDS virus . He...

A new study has found that prior to the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2D), women with versus without prediabetes experience significantly have larger adverse differences in their cardio metabolic health than men. However, the mechanisms responsible for these sex differences remain a mystery. The research, conducted by the Maastricht University Medical Centre, aimed to evaluate sex-related differences in cardiovascular risk factor levels, both before and after the onset of T2D. T2D is known to reduce or even reverse the protective effect of being female on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The metabolic changes that eventually lead to T2D can precede the development of hyperglycemia (caused by poorly controlled blood glucose levels) by years or even decades. Despite this, there has been a little investigation into whether women suffer a relatively worse cardiometabolic risk profile before developing the disease. Read Complete Article Business Standard