Researchers have shown that a novel antibody generated to target an 'essential amino acid sequence’ of both interleukin-17A and F has greater activity and potentially fewer side effects than existing biological therapies for conditions such as as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The antibody, called Ab-IPL-IL-17™, targets a specific section of signalling proteins IL-17A and IL-17F which play a central role in sustaining inflammation during onset and ...

University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have discovered and documented the largest known single dinosaur track site in Alaska. The site, located in Denali National Park and Preserve, has been dubbed “The Coliseum” by researchers. The Coliseum is the size of one-and-a-half football fields and contains layer upon layer of prints preserved in rock. The site is a record of multiple species of dinosaurs over many generations that thrived in what is now Interior Alaska nearly 70 million years ago. The scientists describe the site in a paper recently published ...

It’s an idea that has finally gained scientific consensus: Dogs can be a faster, more precise, less expensive — not to mention friendlier — method of detecting COVID-19 than even our best current technology. A growing number  of studies over the last two or so years has highlighted the power of dogs in detecting the stealthy virus and its variants, even when they are obscured by other viruses, like those from common colds and flu.  “It went from four papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies — that includes more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries and 31,000 samples,” said UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Professor Emeritus Tommy Dickey, who with ...

Bacteria draw from an arsenal of weapons to combat the drugs intended to kill them. Among the most prevalent of these weapons are ribosome-modifying enzymes. These enzymes are growing increasingly common, appearing worldwide in clinical samples in a range of drug-resistant bacteria. Now scientists have captured the first images of one important class of these enzymes in action. The images show how the enzymes latch onto a particular site on the bacterial ribosome and squeeze it like a pair of tweezers to extract an RNA nucleotide and alter it. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the findings, led by scientists at Emory University. The advanced technique ...

A deafened adult cannot recover the ability to hear, because the sensory hearing cells of the inner ear don’t regenerate after damage. In two new studies, partially funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), USC Stem Cell scientists explain why this is the case and how we might be able to change it. “In the non-sensory supporting cells of the inner ear, key genes required for conversion to sensory cells are shut off through a process known as ‘epigenetic silencing.’ By studying how the genes are shut off, we begin to understand how we might turn ...

A collaboration led by UCLA and the Seattle Children’s Research Institute has yielded new knowledge about the genes responsible for the production and release of immunoglobulin G, the most common type of antibody in the human body. The finding has the potential to advance manufacturing of antibody-based therapies for diseases such as cancer and arthritis, as well as the development of medical treatments that rely on the production of antibodies. Antibodies are a group of proteins that are crucial to the immune system. Immunoglobulin G, or IgG, ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Follicular helper T cells, or Tfh cells, have a crucial role in immune defense. Without Tfh cells, B cells cannot form germinal center, or GC, responses during which high-affinity antibodies are generated. When naïve CD4-positive CD4+ T cells receive news of an infection elsewhere in the body, they become activated with additional cell-surface markers, and they differentiate in two directions, becoming either PD-1+CXCR5­– or PD-1+CXCR5+ T cells. PD-1 and CXCR5 are ...

AUSTIN ― Today The University of Texas System Board of Regents Chairman Kevin P. Eltife announced plans to launch a monumental healthcare initiative to accelerate and expand UT Austin’s burgeoning medical district into a world-class academic medical center for education, research and patient care. The University of Texas at Austin Medical Center will start with two new hospital towers -- The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a UT Austin hospital. MD Anderson, the nation’s #1 cancer hospital, ...

Scientists have completed a deep analysis of the proteins driving cancer across multiple tumor types, information that can’t be assessed by genome sequencing alone. Understanding how proteins operate in cancer cells raises the prospect of new therapies that block key proteins that drive cancer growth, or therapies that trigger immune responses to abnormal proteins created by cancer cells. Led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Brigham Young University and other institutions around the world, the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium investigates key proteins driving cancer and how ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 14 August 2023 Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet @Annalsofim Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf ...

Black Americans are 54% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than White Americans, despite a substantial overall reduction in cardiovascular disease mortality nationwide. Now, a new study from Tulane University published in Annals of Internal Medicine has found that this racial disparity can be attributed to social factors such as unemployment, low income, and lack of a partner rather than known factors such as hypertension and obesity.  “For so many years we have focused on smoking, diet, physical ...

In 2020, 771 million people worldwide still lacked access to clean drinking water, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization. For this reason, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) prioritize building new water projects, including handpumps and small piped systems, to bring clean water to rural areas of developing countries. Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez New research from Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, the Greg and Patty Fox Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics and Operations in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, examines the critical problem of drinking ...

A federally funded study, led by University of Cincinnati researcher Nalinikanth Kotagiri, looks to develop a new imaging method that can identify certain types of lung infections — in real time — in order to speed up treatment for critically ill patients.  Kotagiri, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the UC James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy, has been awarded a five-year $3 million, R01 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to develop and study the effectiveness of different kinds of injectable probes (metallic contrast agents) that would collect at the site of the infection and immediately light up under a nuclear ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The whaling industry helped drive industrialization in the 19th century, with whale oil used to light lamps and lubricate machinery. Even after petroleum replaced whale oil as an energy source in the U.S., whaling continued to be part of our cultural imagination and helped develop the idea of an energy industry, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign English professor Jamie L. Jones. Her new book, “Rendered Obsolete: The Afterlife of U.S. Whaling in the Petroleum Age,” examines the influence of a dying industry during the massive energy transition from the organic fuel sources of the 19th century, including whale oil and wood, to the extraction of fossil ...

Only about 10 percent of patients survive as long as five years after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  “Pancreatic cancer is very hard to treat,” said Irving Coy Allen, professor of inflammatory diseases in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. “It's one of the top five deadliest cancers in the U.S. And it's deadly because by the time you find out that you have a tumor, it's usually metastasized. You can usually treat the local tumor, but how do you treat the metastatic lesions?” The National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.6 million to a Virginia Tech team ...

Key takeaways In the fast-growing marketplace for recreational marijuana and related products, products containing cannabinoids called HHCs are gaining popularity. The neurological and physiological effects of HHCs are not well understood. A new study by UCLA chemists is the first to explain how well HHCs bind to receptors in the human body; the scientists also devised a safer way to produce HHCs than the current standard process. As more of the nation has adopted legal marijuana, a glut of products has emerged in dispensaries that contain the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, ...

Scientific journals and research papers are evaluated by a metric known as their “impact factor,” which is based on how many times a given paper is cited by other papers. However, a new study from MIT and other institutions suggests that this measure does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes for all patients, particularly those in low- or middle-income countries. To more fully capture a paper’s impact on health, metrics should take into account the demographics of the researchers who performed the ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science (SC), announced $112 million in funding for 12 projects that focus on collaborations among fusion scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists to maximize the use of high performance computing, including exascale computers. The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program pairs the Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program with the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program to explore solving complex ...

Equipping cancer-infecting, or oncolytic, viruses with tumor-inhibiting genetic cargo stimulates the immune system and helps immunotherapy to shrink or completely clear aggressive tumors in mice, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Medicine led by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC researchers. The results pave the way for clinical trials combining oncolytic viruses with immunotherapy. Oncolytic viruses are genetically modified viruses that target rapidly dividing tumor cells while avoiding normal cells. Oncolytic viruses were originally designed to directly kill cancer cells, but researchers later ...

Reston, VA—In elderly patients with suspected prostate cancer, PSMA PET/CT can diagnose advanced disease and aid in therapy selection without the need for a biopsy. Published in the July issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, this new research demonstrates how imaging with PSMA PET/CT can potentially reduce the number of prostate biopsies and associated complications in the elderly while providing accurate staging data. 68Ga-PSMA PET/CT has gained acceptance as a highly sensitive and specific imaging modality for evaluating the extent of disease in prostate cancer patients. In general, PSMA PET/CT is indicated when intermediate ...

A new study by UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Andrew Wooyoung Kim reveals resilient coping mechanisms used by healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in metro Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled “Coping strategies employed by public psychiatric healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in southern Gauteng, South Africa,”(link is external) Kim's paper was published in PLOS ONE in August. It explores the diverse coping strategies employed by public psychiatric healthcare workers during ...

Despite decades of progress, the origin of life remains one of the great unsolved problems in science. “The most basic features of biology, that organisms are made of cells, that they pass genetic information through DNA, that they use protein enzymes to run their metabolism, all emerged through specific processes in very early evolutionary history,” says Aaron Goldman, Associate Professor of Biology at Oberlin College. “Understanding how these most basic biological systems first took shape will not only give us greater insight into how life works at the most fundamental level, but what life actually is in the ...

A deafened adult cannot recover the ability to hear, because the sensory hearing cells of the inner ear don’t regenerate after damage. In two new studies, partially funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), USC Stem Cell scientists explain why this is the case and how we might be able to change it. “In the non-sensory supporting cells of the inner ear, key genes required for conversion to sensory cells are shut off through a process ...

Government legislation to flag and moderate dangerous content on social media can be effective in reducing harm, even on fast-paced platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) new research shows. Social media posts such as those that promote terrorism and hate, dangerous challenges that put teen lives at risk, or those that glamorise suicide, pose a significant threat to society. And this harm spreads exponentially, like an infectious disease.  Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoiu from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Behavioural Data Science Lab and Philipp J. Schneider from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne harnessed ...

Older adults who play digital puzzle games have the same memory abilities as people in their 20s, a new study has shown. The study, from the University of York, also found that adults aged 60 and over who play digital puzzle games had a greater ability to ignore irrelevant distractions, but older adults who played strategy games did not show the same improvements in memory or concentration.  It is known that as humans age, their mental abilities tend to decrease, particularly the ability to remember a number of things at a single time - known as working memory.  Working ...