Publisher Health

A study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and The City University of New York found that the rates of cannabis use and daily cannabis use have increased across the U.S., and that current cannabis use and daily use are substantially higher among individuals residing in states that have legalized recreational cannabis use, relative to those where cannabis use remains illegal. The study also found that rates of cannabis use are even higher among Americans 12 and older who smoke cigarettes, and who reside in states with recreational cannabis laws, compared to those who live in states where cannabis was illegal in 2017.
“Based upon over a decade of data, cannabis use was markedly more prevalent in states where recreational use is legal for adults, relative to states where it was not in 2017. Yet, the increases in cannabis use during this time period were as fast, or faster, in states where cannabis use is prohibited by law, relative to states that had legalized for recreational use by 2017,” said Renee Goodwin, PhD, adjunct associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and professor of epidemiology at CUNY, and lead author. “It remains to be seen how increased lawful accessi and growing use of cannabis among adults in all states — almost regardless of legal status — will impact the adolescent population. Recent trends, however, outline a potential explosion in both of-age and under-age use,” she noted.
The researchers used data from the 2004-2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a representative survey of U.S. individuals aged 12 and older. State of residence was used to determine state-level medical and recreational cannabis laws. The total sample was 784,293 respondents and for 2017 was 56,276 respondents.
The study found that cannabis use and daily cannabis use increased in the U.S with little difference in the speed of increase by state-level legal status of cannabis use from 2004 through 2017. Cannabis use and daily cannabis were much more common in states with recreationally legal cannabis use, relative to those with legal medical cannabis and those with no legal cannabis use.
Cannabis use was even greater among Americans who also smoke cigarettes in states that had adopted recreational cannabis laws, relative to those where cannabis use was not legal. In 2017, one in three (33 percent) daily cigarette smokers reported cannabis use in the past month in recreationally legal states and almost one in five (18 percent) reported daily cannabis use. In contrast, among non-smokers, one in ten reported any cannabis use in recreationally legal states and 3 percent of non-cigarette smokers in these states reported daily use.
The study found that among adolescents ages 12-17 who used cigarettes daily, the majority (73 percent) had used cannabis in the past month and almost one in three (30 percent) used cannabis daily. Among adolescents who did not smoke cigarettes, 5 percent used cannabis in the past month and one percent used cannabis daily.
The study is published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
Goodwin observes, “U.S. states are rapidly passing legislation, yet what should be requisite public education on how cannabis can be used safely has not accompanied these changes. For instance, retail licenses are being issued and it is expected that recreational retail outlets will open within the year in New York State, yet New York has not provided evidence-based guidance outlining safe cannabis use practices or informing the public of potential health risks associated with various levels of cannabis use.”
Co-authors are Katarzyna Wyka, City University of New York and Andrea Weinberger, Yeshiva University.
The study was supported by National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse (grant number R01-DA20892).

Have you ever wondered why one person can smoke cigarettes for a year and easily quit, while another person will become addicted for life? Why can’t some people help themselves from abusing alcohol and others can take it or leave it? One reason is a person’s genetic proclivity to abuse substances. UNC School of Medicine researchers led by Hyejung Won, PhD, are beginning to understand these underlying genetic differences. The more they learn, the better chance they will be able to create therapies to help the millions of people who struggle with addiction.
Won, assistant professor of genetics and member of the UNC Neuroscience Center, and colleagues identified genes linked to cigarette smoking and drinking. The researchers found that these genes are over-represented in certain kinds of neurons — brain cells that trigger other cells to send chemical signals throughout the brain.
The researchers, who published their work in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, also found that the genes underlying cigarette smoking were linked to the perception of pain and response to food, as well as the abuse of other drugs, such as cocaine. Other genes associated with alcohol use were linked to stress and learning, as well as abuse of other drugs, such as morphine.
Given the lack of current treatment options for substance use disorder, the researchers also conducted analyses of a publicly available drug database to identify potential new treatments for substance abuse.
“We found that antipsychotics and other mood stabilizers could potentially provide therapeutic relief for individuals struggling with substance abuse,” said Nancy Sey, graduate student in the Won lab and the first author of the paper. “And we’re confident our research provides a good foundation for research focused on creating better treatments to address drug dependency.”
Parsing the Genome
Long-term substance use and substance use disorders have been linked to many common diseases and conditions, such as lung cancer, liver disease, and mental illnesses. Yet, few treatment options are available, largely due to gaps in our understanding of the biological processes involved.

Yale scientists have developed a novel Omicron-specific mRNA vaccine that offers superior immune protection against two viral subvariants than standard mRNA vaccines.
The new vaccine, called Omnivax, increased neutralizing antibody response against the BA.1 and BA.2.12.1 Omicron subvariants in pre-immunized mice 19-fold and eight-fold, respectively, compared with standard mRNA vaccines. The improved response against the BA.1 subvariant was reported June 6 in the journal Nature Communications. The results of the study involving the BA.2 subvariant were published July 19 in the journal Cell Discovery.
“While standard mRNA vaccines still offer protection against infection from new variants, their effectiveness wanes over time and was compromised due to immune escaping mutations in emerging variants,” said Sidi Chen, associate professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of both studies. “We wanted to see if we could develop variant-specific vaccines that offer additional protection against emerging subvariants.”
The experimental vaccines, developed in Chen’s lab by a team headed by postdoctoral associate Zhenhao Fang, use engineered lipid nanoparticles to deliver mRNA to cells with “instructions” to create spike proteins from mutating variants, which the virus uses to attach to and infect cells. The presence of these foreign viral fragments prompts the immune system to create antibodies against the virus. The rapid mutation of spike proteins on the surface of the virus over time has created a parade of subvariants and enabled them to blunt the protection of earlier generations of mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The engineered lipid nanoparticle mRNA vaccines can be created quickly, researchers say. For instance, the BA.1 subvariant emerged in mid-November; by mid-December Yale researchers had developed a vaccine against the new strain. However, testing the efficacy of the vaccine in mice and a peer review of the study was not completed until February. By March, the BA.2 subvariant had taken hold as the predominately circulating strain throughout most of the world. The researchers then investigated whether the Omicron variant vaccine maintains its superiority over standard vaccines against BA.2. The new vaccine has also boosted an immune response superior to standard vaccines in mice against this subvariant, researchers reported in the Cell Discovery paper.
“Although translating the new vaccine candidate from bench to bedside requires rigorous testing in human trials, these preclinical studies provide a comprehensive and unbiased evaluation of an Omicron-specific vaccine candidate, which will hopefully fuel the development of next-generation COVID vaccines,” Chen said.
In light of the rise of new BA.4 and BA.5 variants, which have become most common among COVID cases, Yale researchers are currently testing a new vaccine candidate against these variants in mice.
“We have a system in place to combat these emerging subvariants, but we need to adjust the system to respond more quickly to emerging health threats,” Chen said.
Chen is affiliated with the Yale Cancer Center, the Yale Stem Cell Center, the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science, and the Systems Biology Institute and Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Yale’s West Campus.
Yale’s Zhenhao Fang and Lei Peng are co-first authors of both papers. Chen is the corresponding author of both papers. Craig Wilen, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology at Yale, is the co-corresponding author of Nature Communications paper.
The research was primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Bill Hathaway. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Although COVID-19 booster vaccinations in adults elicit high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, antibody levels decrease substantially within 3 months, according to new clinical trial data. The findings, published today in Cell Reports Medicine, are from a study sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The trial was led by NIAID’s Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium.
As part of a “mix and match” clinical trial, investigators administered COVID-19 booster vaccines to adults in the United States who had previously received a primary COVID-19 vaccination series under Emergency Use Authorization. Some participants received the same vaccine as their primary series, and others received a different vaccine. Investigators then evaluated immune responses over time. Results previously reported in The New England Journal of Medicine showed all combinations of primary and booster vaccines resulted in increased neutralizing antibody levels in the recipients.
In the new analysis, investigators report that nearly all vaccine combinations evaluated (see table) elicited high levels of neutralizing antibodies to the Omicron BA.1 sub-lineage. However, antibody levels against Omicron were low in the group that received Ad26.COV2.S as both a primary vaccine and boost. Moreover, immune responses to Omicron in all groups waned substantially, with neutralizing antibody levels decreasing 2.4- to 5.3-fold by three months post-boost. Omicron sub-lineages BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 were 1.5 and 2.5 times less susceptible to neutralization, respectively, compared to the BA.1 sub-lineage, and 7.5 and 12.4 times less susceptible relative to the ancestral D614G strain. BA.5 currently is the dominant variant in the U.S.
The authors note that the findings are consistent with real-world reports showing waning protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection during the Omicron wave in people who received a primary vaccine series plus a booster shot. Additionally, the immune response to Omicron sub-lineages show reduced susceptibility to these rapidly emerging subvariants. The data could be used to inform decisions regarding future vaccine schedule recommendations, including the need for variant vaccine boosting.
NIAID grants supporting this research were UM1AI48372, UM1AI148373, UM1AI148450, UM1AI148452, UM1AI148573, UM1AI148574, UM1AI148575, UM1AI148576, UM1AI148684 and UM1AI148689. Contract 75N93019C00050 from the NIAID Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs) also provided support.
Story Source:
Materials provided by NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Wearable movement-tracking devices may someday be useful in providing early warnings of cognitive decline among older adults, suggest new findings from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The researchers analyzed data from ActiGraph activity monitors, which use an activity-tracking sensor similar to those found in Fitbits and Apple watches, worn by nearly 600 participants in a long-running community-based health study of older adults. They found significant differences in movement patterns between participants with normal cognition and those with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. These differences included less activity during waking hours and more fragmented activity during afternoons among the mild cognitive impairment/Alzheimer’s participants.
The results were published July 19 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
“We tend to think of physical activity as a potential therapy to slow cognitive decline, but this study reminds us that cognitive decline may in turn slow physical activity — and we might someday be able to monitor and detect such changes for earlier and more efficient testing to delay and maybe prevent cognitive impairment that leads to Alzheimer’s,” says study lead author Amal Wanigatunga, PhD, MPH, assistant scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School.
The recent introduction of wearable activity-tracking devices, which are now used by tens of millions of people around the world, has presented an important opportunity for health researchers to measure and track changes in physical movement. The devices can provide automatic, objective measures of daytime physical activity, sleep patterns, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels — and they are typically Internet-connected, allowing their manufacturers to build datasets covering millions of users. Researchers previously did not have such an easy way to access such health-relevant data at such a large scale.
The aim of the new study was to determine if activity-tracker patterns recorded from a cohort of older adults differ meaningfully between the cognitively normal and the cognitively impaired. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is known to be a decades-long process, and researchers generally expect that future disease-modifying interventions will be more effective when started earlier in the disease course. If scientists could identify a distinctive change in activity that predicts the slide into mild cognitive impairment and, eventually, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, then in principle older individuals who show this change in activity could be given further cognitive testing — and, when available, earlier treatment.

The couple advocated the use of hallucinogens in psychotherapy and documented their experiences with hundreds of drugs in two widely read books.Ann Shulgin, who alongside her husband, Alexander Shulgin, developed and experimented with hundreds of psychedelic drugs that he concocted in his California laboratory, then showed readers how to formulate them in a pair of massive books that attracted a cult following, died on July 9 at her home near Lafayette, Calif. She was 91.Her daughter Wendy Tucker confirmed the death.People who use themselves as guinea pigs to research new psychoactive drugs, or to explore the mind-altering capacities of existing ones, are known as psychonauts, and the Shulgins were among the world’s most experienced: Ms. Shulgin claimed to have experienced 2,000 drug-induced psychedelic episodes, an astounding number that pales only in comparison to her husband’s 4,000.They took their work seriously. Whenever Alexander Shulgin, known as Sasha, who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, would concoct a new drug, Ms. Shulgin would give it a try, at a minuscule dose. If it seemed to have an effect, they would convene a panel of friends — fellow chemists, psychiatrists and anthropologists — to test it at higher dosages.One of their friends, the psychologist and noted fellow psychonaut Timothy Leary, told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “I consider Shulgin and his wife to be two of the most important scientists of the 20th century.”They believed that psychedelic drugs held immense promise for use in psychotherapy, and Ms. Shulgin employed drugs like MDMA, better known as Ecstasy or Molly, with her clients for years as a lay therapist. For decades that belief put them far outside the mainstream, but it turns out they were simply ahead of their time: Researchers and therapists have recently begun to embrace the use of hallucinogens, including Ecstasy, in small doses to treat a range of psychological disorders.Ms. Shulgin and her husband, Alexander, in 1979. When he invented new drugs, she would give them a try.Dale Gross/Shulgin Family Trust, via Associated Press“Sasha and I work pretty much as a team,” Ms. Shulgin said in a 2001 interview with the French newspaper Libération, published in English on Erowid, a website devoted to research on psychoactive drugs. “We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual. We supplement each other in our writing.”Dr. Shulgin was known as the “godfather of Ecstasy”: He didn’t invent the drug (that happened in 1912), but he was the first person to describe its potential uses in therapy. He never approved of its recreational use, not because he was a killjoy — he and his wife went to the Burning Man Festival three times — but because its abuse led governments to outlaw it.The Shulgins were among the few researchers in the country allowed to work with federally banned drugs — so-called Schedule 1 drugs — thanks to Dr. Shulgin’s close ties with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was an occasional consultant. In 1981 an administrator from the agency officiated at their wedding, in his backyard.The Shulgins’ relationship with the D.E.A. broke apart after they published their first book together, “PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” (1991). The title stands for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” referring to a class of drugs that includes Ecstasy and mescaline.The book is divided into two parts: first a thinly veiled autobiography, then a do-it-yourself guide to making some 170 drugs, a feature that made the self-published volume an underground hit in the United States and Europe.The feds were less enamored. In 1993 they raided Dr. Shulgin’s laboratory, fined him $25,000 and took away his Schedule 1 license.From then on, the Shulgins insisted, they never experimented with proscribed drugs, just the new ones that Dr. Shulgin devised, which remained legal until they were added to the Schedule 1 list.In any case, their focus was on breaking new ground.“Inventing new psychoactive drugs,” Ms. Shulgin told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “is like composing new music.”Ms. Shulgin at her home in California in 2021. She and her husband complemented each other’s strengths, she said: “He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual.”Wendy Tucker, via Associated PressLaura Ann Gotlieb was born on March 22, 1931, in Wellington, New Zealand, where her father, Bernard Gotlieb, an American diplomat, was serving as consul. Her mother, Gwen (Ormiston) Gotlieb, a native New Zealander, was a homemaker.The Gotliebs moved often: to Sicily, followed by several years in Trieste, Italy; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Santiago, Cuba; and Windsor, Ontario. After Mr. Gotlieb retired, they settled in San Francisco, where Ann took art classes and worked as a medical transcriber.She took her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. “We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head,” she recalled in “PiHKAL.” “It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence.”Her first three marriages ended in divorce. Dr. Shulgin died in 2014. Along with her daughter Ms. Tucker, she is survived by another daughter, Alice Garofalo; two sons, Christopher McRee and Brian Perry; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.After the success of “PiHKAL,” the couple wrote a second volume, “TiHKAL: The Continuation” (1997). The T stands for tryptamines, which include psilocybin and other hallucinogens.While Dr. Shulgin was primarily interested in drugs for their consciousness-expanding capacities, Ms. Shulgin prized them for allowing people to look inward.Though she had no formal training, she considered herself a lay therapist in the Jungian tradition, and she incorporated Ecstasy and other drugs in her practice as a way to help her clients confront repressed emotions, memories and self-impressions.“MDMA is an insight drug,” she said in one interview. “That is its major function. Insight without self-hatred. It allows you to really love yourself and appreciate what you are.”

Patients who contract COVID-19 face a higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, particularly in the three months following infection, according to a new study by Emma Rezel-Potts, Martin Gulliford, and colleagues of King’s College London, United Kingdom, publishing July 19 in the open access journal PLOS Medicine.
Scientists are increasingly recognizing COVID-19 as a multi-system condition that can cause disease throughout the body, likely by triggering pathways that cause inflammation. In the new study, researchers investigated whether a sample of COVID-19 patients developed new cases of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases at higher rates than a sample of people who have never had the disease in the year following infection. They analyzed anonymized medical records from more than 428,000 COVID-19 patients, and the same number of control individuals, matched by age, sex, and family practice. The analysis showed that COVID-19 patients had 81% more diagnoses of diabetes in the first four weeks after contracting the virus and that their risk remained elevated by 27% for up to 12 weeks after infection. COVID-19 was also associated with a six-fold increase in cardiovascular diagnoses overall, mainly due to the development of pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs) and irregular heartbeat. The risk of a new heart disease diagnosis began to decline five weeks after infection and returned to baseline levels or lower within 12 weeks to one year.
The researchers conclude that COVID-19 infection is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disorders and diabetes, but fortunately, there does not appear to be a long-term increase in the incidence of these conditions for patients who have contracted the virus. Based on these findings, they recommend that doctors advise their patients who are recovering from COVID-19 to reduce their risk of diabetes through a healthy diet and exercise.
Coauthor Ajay Shah adds, “The information provided by this very large population-based study on the longer-term effects of COVID-19 on development of cardiovascular conditions and diabetes will be extremely valuable to doctors managing the millions of people who have had COVID-19 by now. It is clear that particular vigilance is required for at least the first 3 months after COVID-19.”
Lead author Emma Rezel-Pottsconcludes, “Use of a large, national database of electronic health records from primary care has enabled us to characterise the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus during the acute and longer-term phases following Covid-19 infection. Whilst it is in the first four weeks that Covid-19 patients are most at risk of these outcomes, the risk of diabetes mellitus remains increased for at least 12 weeks. Clinical and public health interventions focusing on reducing diabetes risk among those recovering from Covid-19 over the longer-term may be very beneficial.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Outliers in the number of cases of influenza-like illness (ILI) that tested negative for influenza were present in global influenza surveillance networks early in the COVID-19 pandemic, an average of 13.3 weeks before the first reported COVID-19 peaks in 16 of the 28 countries included in a new study publishing July 19 in PLOS Medicine by Natalie Cobb of University of Washington, US, and colleagues.
Surveillance systems are important in detecting changes in disease patterns and can act as early warning systems for emerging disease outbreaks. The WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) is a network of centers and laboratories across 123 WHO member states which collect respiratory specimens for influenza testing. Data from these labs are made available through FluNet, a web-based tool for monitoring influenza trends.
In the new study, Cobb and colleagues evaluated outliers in influenza-negative ILI in 2020 compared to trends over the previous five years among 28 countries with established ILI surveillance and a high incidence of COVID-19. The team found that in 16 countries, outliers in this dataset preceded the first reported COVID-19 peaks with an average lag time of 13.3 weeks. The earliest outliers occurred during the week of January 13, 2020 in Peru, the Philippines, Poland, and Spain. In the United States and the United Kingdom, outliers in the dataset were detectable the week of March 9, 2020, 4 to 6 weeks before the first week of the reported COVID-19 peak. Lag times of over 20 weeks were seen in some countries. The researchers say that these outliers may represent undetected spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, although a limitation is that it was not possible to evaluate SAR-CoV-2 positivity during this time.
The findings “highlight the importance of strengthening routine disease surveillance networks to enhance the ability to identify novel diseases and inform public health responses on a global scale,” the researchers say.
Cobb adds, “In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we found increases in cases of non-influenza respiratory illness before the first reported major outbreaks of COVID-19, suggesting COVID-19 may have spread much faster than initially reported globally. We propose using automated tracking of respiratory illness in existing surveillance networks to identify new outbreaks in real time as a type of early warning system.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Malaria is the deadliest mosquito-borne parasitic infection of humans. In 2021, after a century of research, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved the world’s first malaria vaccine. That vaccine reduces the incidence of malaria infections in young children aged 5-17 months by only 30 percent, meaning that it remains critical to continue developing and testing more effective vaccines.
WHO’s goal is to find a vaccine that prevents infection as well as cases of severe malaria. However, testing vaccines in the field is challenging and requires large number of volunteers and long periods of follow-up. This process increases the expense and reduces the number of trials that researchers can perform.
Now, scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s (UMSOM) Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) and the UMSOM Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD), and their collaborators report a new way to test vaccines that may be as rigorous and stringent as exposure to field strains of malaria. Their study was published in the June issue of Nature Communications.
Their method has two key aspects. First, they expose vaccinated volunteers to malaria in a controlled clinical environment. Secondly, for this testing, they use a strain of malaria that is genetically very different from the one used in the vaccine, as well as from strains in the geographic region to which the vaccine is intended.
This technique allows scientists to test how well the vaccine works in small numbers of volunteers under controlled settings and in a rapid fashion and predicts how well the vaccine may perform in the field. This lets researchers select the best vaccines for larger studies in the field. This method will increase the efficiency of vaccine testing and should accelerate malaria vaccine development.
“The standard for many investigators has been to test vaccines with a strain similar to the one used in the vaccine’s development,” explained the study’s lead author, Joana Carneiro da Silva, PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at UMSOM and IGS. “Using a strain that is both genetically distant from the one in the vaccine — as well as from the strains circulating in the area where malaria is rampant and the vaccine will be used- is a more stringent way to test vaccine effectiveness.”
Researchers are studying the effectiveness of a vaccine (PfSPZ Vaccine) made by the company Sanaria, Inc, based in Rockville, Maryland. This vaccine uses the West African parasite strain known as PfNF54. One objective is to use this vaccine to protect individuals with little or no previous exposure to malaria, including those living or traveling in Africa. The long-term goal is to use the vaccine in mass vaccination programs to eliminate malaria from specific regions in Africa.

In humans, a fertilized egg is no guarantee of reproductive success. Most embryos stop developing and perish within days of fertilization, usually because they have an abnormal number of chromosomes. Now, researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons have found that most of these mistakes are due to spontaneous errors in DNA replication in the earliest phase of cell division.
The findings provide new insights into the basic biology of human reproduction and in the long term could lead to improvements in the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The study was published online July 19 in the journal Cell.
Challenging task for early embryos
Approximately 24 hours after a human egg is fertilized, the process of cell division begins. During cell division, the entire genome — 46 chromosomes containing more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA — must be faithfully duplicated. The duplicate sets of chromosomes must then be separated so that each daughter cell receives a complete set.
In many human embryos created for IVF, something goes wrong and some cells within the embryo have too few or too many chromosomes.
“Duplicating the genome is a challenging task for the early embryo,” says study leader Dieter Egli, PhD, the Maimonides Assistant Professor of Developmental Cell Biology (in pediatrics) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.