Hands-on exercises, laboratory demonstrations, and discussions are the centerpieces of the Biomedical Hands-On course for science journalists. Over a period of seven intensive days we will expose journalists to a number of fundamental techniques and concepts which will provide the basic elements of cell and molecular biological approaches underlying much of modern day biomedical research.
Advances in genomics and molecular genetics have made an enormous contribution to understanding the pathogenesis of human disease. Exploitation of this knowledge has opened up new avenues of research where the genes and pathways altered in human disease can be reproduced in "humanized" models. These systems have enormous potential not only in the development of new strategies for disease prevention but also for the validation of new drug targets and for drug efficacy screening. These models also provide an experimental approach to understanding the relative role of environment versus genetic factors in disease etiology - a research area that is almost intractable with other current experimental models. In addition, the genes that have evolved to protect animals from the environment can exhibit marked species differences in their functions, level of expression and regulation. This can often lead to great difficulty in extrapolating drug safety data obtained as part of drug development in animals to man. An approach to circumvent some of these problems is the generation of models that have been "humanised" for these metabolic pathways. It is the aim of this course to develop an experimental strategy and discuss some of the outstanding advances that have recently been made in modelling human disease and how these models can be applied to disease prevention and to the development of new drug therapies.
