May 11, 2021
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“Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor who teaches at UCLA and Columbia University.
At the time, highway planners used the language of science to justify building freeways through communities of color, says Eric Avila, a professor of urban studies at UCLA. “They presented a kind of dizzying array of charts and graphs to insist that this was the most economically efficient route for this particular freeway. They denied any questions of race, they denied any questions of bias.”
By City News Service
May 12, 2021
LOS ANGELES (CNS) - An experimental form of gene therapy developed by a team of researchers from UCLA and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London has successfully treated 48 of 50 children born with a rare and deadly inherited disorder that leaves them without an immune system, according to a study published today.
Severe combined immunodeficiency due to adenosine deaminase deficiency, or ADA-SCID, is caused by mutations in the ADA gene that creates the enzyme adenosine deaminase, which is essential to a functioning immune system. For children with the condition, even day-to-day activities like going to school or playing with friends can lead to dangerous, life-threatening infections. If untreated, ADA-SCID can be fatal within the first two years of life.
May 11, 2021 Share
A gene therapy that makes use of an unlikely helper, the AIDS virus, gave a working immune system to 48 babies and toddlers who were born without one, doctors reported Tuesday.
Results show that all but two of the 50 children who were given the experimental therapy in a study now have healthy germ-fighting abilities.
“We’re taking what otherwise would have been a fatal disease” and healing most of these children with a single treatment, said study leader Dr. Donald Kohn of UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital.
“They’re basically ‘free range’ going to school, doing normal things,” without the worry that any infection could become life-threatening, he said.
An investigational gene therapy can safely restore the immune systems of infants and children who have a rare, life-threatening inherited immunodeficiency disorder, according to research supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.
The scientific name for bubble baby disease is severe combined immunodeficiency due to adenosine deaminase deficiency, or ADA-SCID.
It occurs due to mutations in the ADA gene that is responsible for making the enzyme adenosine deaminase, required for the correct formation of immune cells. Therefore, the condition in children causes the bone marrow not to develop the functioning immune cells required to fight off infections.
For these children, even simple daily activities like hugging a parent carry enormous risks because they could catch an infection, which can easily be life-threatening as they don t have the immune cells to protect them.