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Stand By for Oz Buzz

The Huntington’s disease World Congress starts this weekend. Follow @HDBuzzFeed for live updates, check out HDBuzz.net for the latest news and videos, and send us your questions for the top HD scientists.

Oz Buzz – live from The World Congress on Huntington’s disease

The World Congress on Huntington’s disease is the biggest international meeting of HD scientists, care professionals and family members. The 2011 World Congress begins in Melbourne, Australia this Sunday – 11th September.

Your HDBuzz editors – Dr Jeff Carroll and Dr Ed Wild – have teamed up with Emmy award-winning broadcaster Charles Sabine to present Oz Buzz – reporting live from the World Congress. In the spirit of HDBuzz, we’ll be bringing the most exciting scientific news to the global HD community.

Follow HDBuzzFeed on Twitter for live updates

Throughout the World Congress, Ed and Jeff will be using Twitter to post plain language news updates, in real time, from within the science sessions. So if you want the very hottest news, as it happens, follow @HDBuzzFeed.

Daily updates at HDBuzz.net

Each evening, we’ll post a new article to HDBuzz.net, containing all the day’s science updates from the Congress. Like any HDBuzz article, you’ll be able to read it at HDBuzz.net, on the community websites that use the HDBuzz feed, and in your inbox, if you’ve signed up to receive our email updates.

Oz Buzz live on stage

On the evenings of Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th September, Jeff, Ed and Charles will present Oz Buzz live, featuring the news headlines from the day, and in-depth interviews with top HD researchers – all in easy-to-understand language – plus some entertaining features on the social life behind the Congress and the host city of Melbourne.

Video of the live sessions will be available to watch at HDBuzz.net within a few hours after the session.

Oz Buzz needs you!

We’ll be interviewing three top scientists each night – and we want you to send us questions for them. Now’s your chance to get an answer to that burning question you’ve been wondering about, straight from the horse’s mouth. The scientists we’ll be interviewing, and the areas we’ll be covering, are:

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  • Dr Frank Bennett of Isis Pharmaceuticals – gene silencing therapy

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  • Dr Tony Hannan of Florey Neuroscience Institutes, Melbourne – environmental factors that can influence HD onset and progression

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  • Prof Leslie Thompson of University of California Irvine – how our DNA and the huntingtin protein are chemically modified by cells

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  • Dr Rachael Scahill of University College London – how magnetic resonance imaging will help us to run clinical trials in HD

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  • Prof Steve Finkbeiner of Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease – how cells handle harmful proteins

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  • Prof Paul Muchowski of Gladstone -targeting the immune system to help brain cells to survive

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You can send us your questions in several ways:

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  • By email to [email protected]

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  • Tweet us – @HDBuzzFeed

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  • Record your question on YouTube and send us the link by email or tweet

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Please tell us your name (or nickname) and what country you’re in. Send your questions any time – before or during the Congress – and the best ones will be asked during the live session.

We hope you enjoy our World Congress coverage – we aim to make it the most accessible international research meeting the global HD community has seen.

Latest Research Articles

Regulating repetition: Gaining control of CAG repeats could slow progression of Huntington’s disease

Published date: 30 November, 2023

“Somatic expansion” is a hot topic in Huntington’s disease research. Somatic expansion is a process in which CAG repeats lengthen in some cells during aging. It’s thought to control how early HD symptoms appear. A group of researchers from Toronto, Canada recently identified proteins that may play an important role in regulating this process. Understanding ... Read more

Getting to the Root of Huntington's Disease: A Plant-Based Approach

Published date: 15 October, 2023

Researchers studied a fragment of the Huntington’s disease (HD) protein in plants and found a new way to stop it from forming toxic clumps. A special plant protein that the team identified can prevent harmful buildup in plants as well as in some HD model systems, showing potential for this approach as a possible way ... Read more

Could halting CAG expansions be a new treatment for HD?

Published date: 5 October, 2023

A recent paper from a group at UMass Chan Medical School, spearheaded by Dr. Daniel O'Reilly and led by Dr. Anastasia Khvorova, used genetic strategies to lower a protein other than huntingtin. This time the researchers went after a gene called MSH3. This is a gene that’s been getting a lot of attention in Huntington’s ... Read more

Tipping the balance; new insights into HD genetic modifiers

Published date: 1 September, 2023

Genetic modifiers can influence when HD symptoms begin. Some of these genes encode for different types of molecular machines whose normal job is to repair our DNA when it is broken or damaged. A recently published study from scientists at Thomas Jefferson University uncovers details of how these molecular machines help repair damaged DNA structures ... Read more

Drug to treat movement symptoms of HD approved by FDA

Published date: 22 August, 2023

The vast majority of people with Huntington’s disease experience movement symptoms known as chorea. Valbenazine, also known as INGREZZA, has recently been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), allowing doctors in the USA to prescribe this medicine for Huntington’s disease (HD) chorea. In this article we go through the key points ... Read more

Youthful competitors: young brain cells oust the old

Published date: 8 August, 2023

When you lose something, an easy solution can be to just replace it. But what if the something you’ve lost are cells in the brain? Can they simply be replaced? Some researchers have been working toward this for Huntington’s disease (HD) by injecting new cells into the brains of animal models. A recent publication that ... Read more