Following encouraging results from pre-clinical research and a recent clinical trial on stem cell-based treatments for patients with Type 1 diabetes, researchers are now working on maximizing the function and potential of stem cell-based treatments for future application in patients.    More than 8 billion people worldwide live with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) according to recent estimates. In T1D, the so-called beta cells in the pancreas do not make enough of the hormone insulin due to the destruction of beta-cells by the immune system leading to blood sugar levels rising above normal levels. Over time, T1D can lead to severe organ damage. There is no cure ...

Researchers have used heart and lung stem cells infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 to better understand how the disease impacts different organs, paving the way for more targeted treatments. The research, co-led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), found the responses to SARS-CoV-2 varied significantly depending on the cell type, allowing the team to identify effective anti-viral drugs to treat infection in heart and lung cells. The findings were published in the 10th anniversary edition of Stem Cell Reports.  Murdoch ...

Four state policies introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to spur expansion of telehealth were associated with expansion of such services by mental health facilities, but growth of telehealth was lower among facilities in counties with the greatest proportion of Black residents, according to a new RAND Corporation study.   Expansion of telehealth also was lower among facilities that accepted Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, two government insurance programs that aid primarily lower-income Americans, according to the study.   The findings show that disparities in access to mental health care persisted even as ...

Only 1 in 4 residential addiction treatment facilities caring for U.S. adolescents under 18 years old offer buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder, according to a new study. Only 1 in 8 offer buprenorphine for ongoing treatment. These findings highlight a significant gap in access to evidence-based addiction treatment among young people. Published in JAMA, this study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences ...

LA JOLLA (June 13, 2023)—The immune system protects the body from invaders, such as bacteria, viruses, or tumors, with its intricate network of proteins, cells, and organs. Specialized immune cells, called cytotoxic T cells, can develop into short-lived effector cells that kill infected or cancerous cells within our bodies. A small portion of those effector cells remain after an infection and become longer-lived memory cells, which “remember” infections and respond when infections reappear. ...

PHILADELPHIA—The Pew Charitable Trusts today announced the 22 researchers selected to join the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences. These early-career scientists will receive four years of funding to spearhead innovative studies exploring human health and medicine. “From vaccine development to treatments for complex diseases, biomedical research is foundational to solving some of the world’s greatest health challenges,” said Susan K. Urahn, Pew’s president and CEO. “Pew is thrilled to welcome this new class of researchers and support their efforts to advance scientific knowledge and improve human ...

PHILADEPHIA—The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust announced today the 2023 class of the Pew-Stewart Scholars Program for Cancer Research. These early-career scientists will receive four-year grants to explore new horizons in cancer development, diagnosis, and treatment. This class marks the 10th year the Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust has partnered with Pew to build a legacy of innovative cancer research. “Cancer is one of the most pressing challenges facing biomedical researchers today,” said Susan K. Urahn, Pew’s president and CEO. “Pew ...

PHILADELPHIA – The Pew Charitable Trusts today announced the 2023 class members of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences. These 10 postdoctoral fellows from seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay—will receive two years of funding to conduct research in laboratories throughout the United States. The fellows will work under the mentorship of prominent biomedical scientists, including an alum of the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences. “Scientific ...

Most women diagnosed with early stage breast cancer today can expect to become long term cancer survivors, finds a study published by The BMJ today. The findings show that the average risk of dying from breast cancer in the five years after a diagnosis has fallen from 14% to 5% since the 1990s. For those diagnosed during 2010-15, more than six in 10 women had a five year risk of 3% or less. The researchers say their findings can be used to reassure most women treated for early breast cancer that they are likely to become long term cancer survivors. ...

The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) has released updated recommendations for CFTR carrier screening –Updated recommendations for CFTR carrier screening: A position statement of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. Pathogenic variants in the CFTR gene can cause cystic fibrosis (CF) as well as CF-related disorders. The new updated ACMG CFTR variant list includes a set of 100 variants.* The new CFTR variant list represents an updated minimum recommended variant set for CF carrier screening and supersedes the previous group of 23 CFTR variants recommended by the ACMG. These revised recommendations apply to carrier screening, a type of genetic ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A common weight-loss surgery for obese adolescents and young adults is found to have harmful effects on bones, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “Childhood obesity is on the rise and weight-loss surgery is the most effective way to reduce weight and improve cardiometabolic comorbidities,” said the study’s lead investigator, Miriam A. Bredella, M.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and vice chair for Faculty Affairs and Clinical Operations, Department of Radiology ...

PeerJ, the award-winning Open Access publisher, has announced the launch of the Open Advances series of journals, part of its ongoing commitment to democratizing scientific communication. The series will foster an equitable approach that empowers researchers worldwide to contribute valuable insights towards solving global challenges. The journals will be fully Open Access but will not charge authors a fee to publish.  The Open Advances series is a transformative endeavor that cements PeerJ's commitment to openness, innovation, ...

June 13, 2023 – Enrollment in the Medicare Advantage program – which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their health care through plans administered by private insurance companies – has been growing so rapidly that it has recently surpassed enrollment in traditional Medicare. A new analysis by USC researchers warns that overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans now exceed 20 percent or $75 billion annually, underscoring the urgent need for reform. Researchers with the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics found that the millions of beneficiaries in traditional Medicare who have switched to Medicare ...

Philadelphia, June 13, 2023 – Cognitive deficits accompany mood disorders and other psychiatric conditions, often with debilitating effects. Limited treatments currently exist, but studies in animals and humans have pointed to drugs such as the laxative prucalopride that activate serotonin receptors as a potential therapeutic for the symptoms. It has remained unclear, however, how the medication affects resting brain activity. Now, a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier, examines the drug’s effects in healthy human adults. Serotonin receptors and the 5-HT4-type receptors in particular are found in areas ...

Positive parenting—as reported by children and teenagers— protects young people from the deleterious effects of stressors like financial hardship or serious illness, according to a study. Jamie Hanson and colleagues examined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data along with survey data for 482 participants in an ongoing study, the Healthy Brain Network, who were between the ages of 10–17 at the time of data collection. Previous work has found associations between stress and small hippocampal volumes as well as between stress and behavioral problems—associations confirmed ...

The universe is big, and it’s getting bigger. To study dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of our universe, scientists are using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to map more than 40 million galaxies, quasars, and stars. Today, the collaboration publicly released its first batch of data, with nearly 2 million objects for researchers to explore. The 80-terabyte data set comes from 2,480 exposures taken over six months during the experiment’s “survey validation” phase in 2020 and 2021. In this period ...

Human activities have a significant impact on natural waters, aquatic biodiversity and the quality of drinking water resources. For Professor Mathieu Lapointe of the Department of Construction Engineering at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), it is possible to treat certain types of wastewater—not currently treated—globally using more sustainable and affordable in situ methods.  In a study carried out by Professor Lapointe and published in the Nature journal, the rate of discharge into the environment of certain ...

CHICAGO, IL (June 13, 2023) — Scholastica, a leading academic journal publishing software provider, has announced CRediT Taxonomy support across its products and services in line with ANSI/NISO guidelines. The CRediT Taxonomy, which consists of 14 research contributor roles, helps facilitate transparency around research development processes and ensure proper acknowledgment of all contributors. With the new CRediT implementation, journals using Scholastica's peer review system can request to have CRediT fields added to their submission form, ...

CD8+ T cells, a vital component of the immune system that provides immunity against cancer, have been the focal point of anti-cancer therapies. Recent studies have identified two major subpopulations of these cells present within the tumor—the stem-like cells that do not have anti-tumor activity, and the terminally differentiated CD8+ T cells, which are generated from the stem-like cells and have cytotoxic function on tumor cells. Tumor-draining lymph nodes (TDLNs) have been found to be the primary site for the presence of these cells. However, the molecular mechanisms responsible for the generation of stem-like cells into terminally differentiated ...

Repeat treatment with corticosteroid injections improved vision in people with persistent or recurrent uveitis-related macular edema better than two other therapies, according to results from a clinical trial funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI). Compared with methotrexate or ranibizumab intravitreal (in-the-eye) injections, the corticosteroid treatment achieved greater reductions in retinal swelling and was the only therapy in the study that improved vision. The report was published today in the journal Ophthalmology. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. “Prior to this study, we didn’t know the best treatment for persistent or recurrent macular edema, a major ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- In collaboration with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, Binghamton University has announced a New Educational and Research Alliance (New ERA) with six historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Alabama A&M University, Central State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie-View A&M University, the University of the District of Columbia and Virginia State University. The groundbreaking partnership is built on the shared missions of education, research and service, aiming to foster holistic, equitable and sustainable collaborations that will shape the future of academia and beyond. The strategic alliances formed through this partnership will ...

How do you study the effects of exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), when it is in everything?! To study the effect of a chemical, toxicologists typically expose animals to various doses of the chemical over a period of time so that they could then study the dose versus effect relationship. Such toxicology studies often employee several types of “blanks” for quality control. Blanks are experiments where the test animals are not given any dose of the chemical being studied (sort of like a placebo in human drug ...

Tulsa, Okla. – A pioneering study conducted by researchers at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) in Tulsa, Okla., has made significant strides in understanding the elusive gut-brain connection, a complex relationship that has long puzzled scientists due to the difficulty of accessing the body's interior. The study, “Parieto-occipital ERP indicators of gut mechanosensation in humans,” appears in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications. The research team successfully had ...

Plant roots play a critical role in taking up, selecting, enriching and retaining a range of different mineral elements thereby supplying distant plant tissues with nutrients while sequestering excessive amounts of metals. To execute such element-specific functions, a range of ion transporters present at roots mediate the uptake, efflux and intracellular compartmentalization of different mineral elements. Most ion transporters show characteristic tissue and cell type-specific localization patterns, which can be altered in response to internal signalling or external cues. To fully ...

A groundbreaking machine-learning study has unmasked the best drug combinations to prevent COVID-19 from coming back after an initial infection. It turns out these combos are not the same for every patient.  Using real-world data from a hospital in China, the UC Riverside-led study found that individual characteristics, including age, weight, and additional illness determine which drug combinations most effectively reduce recurrence rates. This finding has been published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.  That the data came from China is significant for two reasons. First, when patients are treated for COVID-19 in the U.S, it is ...