Research in Progress

Community News Briefs

New Internet HD Database to be Launched

On January 9, the electronic publications NewsRx.com ran an article entitled “Research community website for Huntington disease planned” about HDBase (http://hdbase.org/), a forthcoming Huntington’s disease site. It was designed by researcher Nathan Goodman of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Goodman and his wife, Dr. LaVonne Veatch Goodman, both have a family history of HD and decided to create a website called Huntington’s Disease Drug Works (www.hddrugworks.org). The site provides information about clinical trials for new HD medications, as well as links to other HD sites. One member of the site’s scientific advisory board is Dr. Marcela V. Karpuj, a neurobiologist at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases in San Francisco and former graduate student of Dr. Lawrence Steinman of Stanford University. (For more information on Dr. Steinman’s HD research, click here.)

HDBase will focus on therapeutic studies in mouse models and studies about gene expression, as well as antibodies and proteins used in HD research. Attempting not to duplicate the information found on other HD websites, Goodman and his colleagues work with other database creators and contributors to complement their sites and share information. In fact, all the software for HDBase will be open source, meaning that the public can freely use and modify its code.

Last Modified: 04/12/2007

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