Fueled by physician staffing shortages and shifting employment patterns, temporary substitute physicians, so-called “locum tenens” physicians, become a regular sight in the medical field. But do they provide the same level of care as the doctors they are filling in for? The answer appears to be “yes,” at least when it comes to death rates in the month following treatment, according to…
Researchers using CT scans and 3-D printing have created accurate, custom-designed prosthetic replacements for damaged parts of the middle ear, according to a study being presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The technique has the potential to improve a surgical procedure that often fails because of incorrectly sized prosthetic implants, researchers…
Type 2 diabetes, which affects >0.5 billion people worldwide, results from the inability of beta cells in the pancreatic islets to provide the body with enough insulin to maintain blood glucose levels within the range for a healthy life. A collaborative study led by Prof. Michele Solimena at the Technische Universität in Dresden as well as the Helmholtz Zentrum München, Dr. Anke M Schulte at…
Walk into the local grocery store and you’re likely to find an array of products with the words “gluten-free” splashed across the label. Everything from cereal to frozen pizza to pasta — and even water — is getting the gluten-free treatment. According to a recent survey, 30 percent of Americans said they were cutting down or avoiding gluten altogether. And yet, only four percent of the…
Cancer therapies including radiation and chemotherapy seek to treat the disease by killing tumor cells. Now a team including researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have shown that the dead and dying cancer cells generated by chemotherapy and targeted cancer therapy paradoxically trigger inflammation that promotes aggressive tumor growth. In a study published today in the…
Scientists are using their increasing knowledge of the complex interaction between cancer and the immune system to engineer increasingly potent anti-cancer vaccines. Now researchers at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have developed a synergistic nanovaccine packing DNA and RNA sequences that modulate the immune response, along with anti-tumor antigens, into…
Findings published in Oncotarget offer new hope for children with highly aggressive brain tumors like atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT) and medulloblastoma. Previously, the authors of the study have shown that an experimental drug that inhibits polo-like kinase 4 (PLK4) stopped pediatric brain tumor growth in vitro. Now, they have demonstrated its success in an animal model – the drug…
Nitzan Rosenfeld from Cancer Research UK in Cambridge is being honored with the 2017 Meyenburg Award, which carries a €50,000 monetary prize. He receives the award for his excellent work on the detection of tumor DNA in the blood. Rosenfeld has made seminal contributions to advancing a method for detecting cancer DNA in the blood to applicability in cancer medicine. The Meyenburg-Award will be…
An SLAS Technology review article by Yiyan Li, Xing Yang and Weian Zhao of University of California, Irvine highlights and synthesizes representative emerging micro- and nanotechnologies, as well as automated systems for bacterial identification (ID) and antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST), including both phenotypic and molecular methods and those at the point-of-care (POC) setting. Also…
Gold nanoparticles could help make drugs act more quickly and effectively, according to new research conducted at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Nanoparticles are microscopic particles that are bigger than atoms but smaller than what the eye can see. They are unique for their large surface area-to-volume ratio and their fairly ubiquitous nature. A new study, co-conducted by…
In a comprehensive and complex molecular study of blood samples from Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, published in Cell Host and Microbe, a scientific team led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison has identified signatures of Ebola virus disease that may aid in future treatment efforts. Conducting a sweeping analysis of everything from enzymes to lipids to immune-system-associated molecules,…
Primary liver cancer is now the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, and its incidences and mortality are increasing rapidly in the United Stated. In late stages of the malignancy, there are no effective treatments or drugs. However, an unexpected finding made by a team of University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers sheds light on the development of a new…
Just how it works is not known - but human beings have an internal clock which enables us to perceive and estimate periods of time subconsciously. A research team under Dr. Roland Thomaschke of the University of Freiburg’s Department of Psychology showed in experiments that this mental time-processing system is able to adapt quickly and flexibly to predictive time patterns. The study has been…
A research team in the United States has developed a revolutionary technique that has encoded an image and short film in living cells. Scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) used CRISPR gene editing to encode the image and film in DNA, using this as a medium to store information and produce a code that relates to the individual…
Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have identified a peptide that could lead to the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The discovery, published in Nature Communications, may also provide a means of homing drugs to diseased areas of the brain to treat AD, Parkinson’s disease, as well as glioblastoma, brain injuries and stroke. “Our goal was to…
A novel vaccine against cancer-causing human papillomaviruses (HPV) is intended to help raise vaccination rates especially in developing countries. To this end, scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg are developing a completely new vaccination concept based on a low-cost vaccine that protects from almost all known oncogenic HPV types. The project has now been…
With a scarcity of lungs available for transplantation, the use of lungs from donors older than age 60 has been shown to achieve reasonable outcomes and should be considered as a viable option, according to research published online in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. “The availability of suitable donor lungs for transplantation continues to be a major obstacle to increasing the number of lung…
Even 20 years after a diagnosis, women with a type of breast cancer fueled by estrogen still face a substantial risk of cancer returning or spreading, according to a new analysis from an international team of investigators published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Standard treatment for estrogen receptor-positive, or ER-positive, breast cancer includes five years of the endocrine-based…
Little exercise, fatty food and too many cigarettes – factors like these aid the onset of arterial calcification, also known as arteriosclerosis. If blood can no longer be pumped through arteries properly, this can lead to a heart attack or stroke. Doctors are typically only able to diagnose the disease once it reaches an advanced stage. Computer scientists at the University of Kaiserslautern…
Want to restore hearing by injecting stem cells into the inner ear? Well, that can be a double-edged sword. Inner ear stem cells can be converted to auditory neurons that could reverse deafness, but the process can also make those cells divide too quickly, posing a cancer risk, according to a study led by Rutgers University–New Brunswick scientists. The encouraging news is that turning stem…
Computer Tomography (CT) is a standard procedure in hospitals, but so far, the technology has not been suitable for imaging extremely small objects. In PNAS, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) describes a Nano-CT device that creates three-dimensional x-ray images at resolutions up to 100 nanometers. The first test application: Together with colleagues from the University of…
A new study led by Johns Hopkins researchers found that measures of connectivity within specific cerebral networks were strongly linked to long-term functional outcomes in patients who had suffered severe brain injury following a cardiac arrest. A description of the findings, published in October in the journal Radiology, suggests that mapping and measuring such connectivity may result in highly…
New research presented at APHA’s 2017 Annual Meeting and Expo examined the burden of air pollution and its association with mortality in Chinese cities. The study by researchers at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health showed a significant correlation between higher air quality index concentrations and higher mortality rates. The study is the first to provide strong evidence of the…
A clinical trial involving hundreds of participants has shown that one of the most frequently prescribed antidepressants may not benefit millions of patients who also have chronic kidney disease (CKD). “These results provide evidence that could change clinical practice,” said Dr. Susan Hedayati, Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern and first author of the study, which was…
Patients with advanced breast cancer who are treated with a combination of drugs that target specific molecules important for cancer development and also the hormones that are driving it are at increased risk of suffering adverse side effects. In new research presented at the Advanced Breast Cancer Fourth International Consensus Conference (ABC 4), researchers have shown that combining targeted…
