Enrollment in a Phase 1 trial of a new investigational universal influenza vaccine candidate has begun at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The trial is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, and will evaluate the investigational vaccine for safety and its ability to elicit an immune response. Currently available seasonal influenza (or “flu”) vaccines are effective at preventing specific strains of influenza. Each year, the vaccines are re-evaluated and changed to best match the strains of flu predicted to be the most dominant in the upcoming flu ...

A University of Massachusetts Amherst neuroscientist has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke to advance knowledge on human brain development by using an unusual subject: the brain of the sea slug. This tiny invertebrate is an ideal candidate to study for brain development because it adds a countable number of neurons to its brain – the number increases more than 40-fold in less than eight weeks to a total of about 10,000 neurons – while the animal grows and performs behaviors, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have successfully transferred an important gene from one compartment of a plant cell to another to produce tobacco plants that lack pollen and viable seeds, while otherwise growing normally. Their findings could lead to better ways of producing hybrid seeds to maximize crop productivity, or to introduce seedlessness in fruit species lacking the often-desired trait, such as raspberries, blackberries or muscadine grapes. The researchers began the work in the energy-producing portion of a cell, the mitochondria. In plants, aberrations within the mitochondrial genome can be associated with ...

A research project supported by FAPESP shows that the construction of new hydroelectric power plants in Brazil’s South region could have an impact on more than 30% of the habitat of Phrynops williamsi, the Williams’ side-necked turtle. The species occurs only in areas of Atlantic Rainforest and Pampa (the grassland biome adjacent to Brazil’s border with Uruguay and Argentina), and is classed as “Vulnerable” (facing a high risk of extinction) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). An article on the study is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by ...

(BOSTON)—The National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging recently awarded a $13.7 million grant to a project led by Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine principal investigators Lindsay Farrer, PhD, chief of biomedical genetics and distinguished professor of genetics, and Richard Sherva, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in biomedical genetics, for research using whole genome sequencing and other approaches to identify genetic factors for Alzheimer disease (AD) in Jews currently living in ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue researcher is taking a giant leap forward in the fight against drug-resistant strains of malaria in developing countries. Open Philanthropy has awarded $1.38 million to Philip Low to further validate a drug therapy that he and his colleagues have previously shown to successfully treat the disease. Low (rhymes with “now”) is Purdue University’s Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery and the Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the College of Science. For years, experts ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content. For the study, the researchers asked World Health Organization-trained participants and workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to intentionally ...

A team of scientists, led by researchers at UCL, have developed new methods to predict outcomes for pregnancies where there are issues with poor growth of the baby inside the womb. The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, involved 142 women from the EVERREST Prospective Study* who had severe early-onset fetal growth restriction (FGR) – meaning their babies were very small on ultrasound scans early in the second half of pregnancy (between 20 and 27 weeks). Fetal growth restriction affects approximately ...

Sage offers journalists free access to the articles in all of our 1,100 journals upon request. You can submit your request via this form or contact pr@sagepub.co.uk for more information. Sage also provides paywall-free links to the Sage articles journalists cite so the audience can read the underlying scholarship for free. To get a paywall-free link to an article in Sage journals, please email pr@sagepub.co.uk with the name of the article and the journal one business day ahead of the publication of the article.     Sage has pledged to improve access to our research both to bridge ...

Health systems science is an emerging field that focuses on how care is delivered, how health professionals collaborate, and how the health system can improve patient care and health care delivery. The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine (VTCSOM) is a leader in both its education and its research in health systems science. Both are evident in two recently awarded grants from the American Medical Association to study ways to enhance health systems science education, one at the medical education ...

In a new study published on 26 July 2023, in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology, have developed a novel double Z-scheme photocatalyst, called the molecularly imprinted TiO2@Fe2O3@g-C3N4 (MFTC) composite, that selectively removes SMX from water. Traditional photocatalytic methods have faced challenges with selectivity, often causing the indiscriminate degradation of organic pollutants and coexisting contaminants at high concentrations. However, the MFTC composite was purposefully designed to overcome this limitation by incorporating molecularly imprinted sites on its surface. These specialized ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 44,000 low-income, working-age adults suggest that the direct cost of providing public health insurance to immigrants is less than that for the U.S. born, and immigrants’ health care utilization, upon coverage, remains comparatively modest, thus refuting the notion that providing insurance to immigrants imposes a heavy fiscal burden.  Authors: Felix M. Muchomba, Ph.D., of the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.34008) Editor’s ...

· How two sisters’ misfortune led to discovery · Findings open a new avenue for therapies · Drugs need to target neuron synapses before neurons degenerate   CHICAGO --- A new Northwestern Medicine study challenges a common belief in what triggers Parkinson’s disease. Degeneration of dopaminergic neurons is widely accepted as the first event that leads to Parkinson’s. But the new study suggests that a dysfunction in the neuron’s synapses — the tiny gap across which a neuron can send an impulse to another neuron — leads to deficits in dopamine and precedes the neurodegeneration. Parkinson’s disease ...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bsheal.2023.07.003   Monkeypox (mpox) is a zoonotic disease caused by the mpox virus (MPXV) that has been primarily limited to Central and West African nations since its discovery. The recent spread of the West African lineage of MPXV in historically unaffected countries has raised concerns for global public health. Despite a significant decrease in global mpox cases, there is still a risk of a global resurgence. This study reports the first local case of mpox caused by an imported case in the Chinese mainland. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnosed the two ...

https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.15212/ZOONOSES-2023-0016 Announcing a new article publication for Zoonoses journal. Members of the genus, Klebsiella, are becoming increasingly challenging to control due to the recent convergence of multidrug resistant (MDR) and hypervirulent (hv) phenotypes in some species of concern to One Health . This article provides an introduction to this bacterial genus in the hospital and other settings, update Klebsiella taxonomy, and comment on recent findings describing the prevalence of Klebsiella species in the food chain, a hitherto infrequently recognised ecologic niche. The paper also ...

Customers showing up even when they were sick, not agreeing with the restrictions, and many new tasks for staff. These are factors that contributed to heavier workloads and tougher work environments in pharmacies during the pandemic, a study reveals. The scientific study, published in the journal Exploratory Research in Clinical and Social Pharmacy, was conducted by researchers at the University of Gothenburg and Åbo Akademi University. The data consists of a questionnaire that was distributed to all ...

Home-delivery services perpetually compete for the consumer’s attention not only through advertisements but also through methods that reduce basket decision time or make new suggestions. Current research on the topic focuses on optimizing delivery schedules and minimizing costs. However, neither the insufficiency of home delivery options for some cities nor the bigger problem of high carbon emissions due to the abundance of it, are resolved. A new study conducted by Koç University Industrial Engineering Department professor Barış Yıldız takes a fresh perspective ...

About The Study: Receiving at least two doses of wild-type BNT162b2 vaccine (Pfizer) was associated with a reduced risk of COVID-19 emergency department or urgent care and outpatient visits in children younger than five years. The risk of SARS-CoV-2 encounters appeared lower for those with two versus three doses of BNT162b2, albeit with wide CIs, which is likely due to more immune-evasive Omicron sublineages (e.g., BQ.1-related and XBB-related strains) becoming dominant by the time young children received their third dose and longer median time since dose three compared with dose two. Authors: Sara Y. Tartof, Ph.D., M.P.H., of ...

New analysis of pilot studies on night shift naps conducted from 2012 to 2018 revealed the ideal snoozing strategy that might help counteract drowsiness and fatigue during a 16-hour overnight duty. The findings can also benefit new parents. Reanalysis of data showed that when staying up all night, scheduling two nap sessions — a 90-minute one followed by a quick 30-minute shut-eye later — is the optimal choice over a single 120-minute snooze in putting off drowsiness and fatigue. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports. “A 90-minute nap to maintain long-term performance and a ...

CHICAGO — Anesthesiology researchers are responsible for some of medicine’s most significant advances, from the Apgar score that tests a newborn’s health to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). But the number of medical residents in the anesthesiology physician-scientist (researcher) pipeline trails other specialties, particularly among women, according to findings of the Anesthesia Research Council (ARC), published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia. Out of eleven medical specialties, anesthesiology ranked eighth both for the percentage of entering residents ...

PHILADELPHIA—For his work discovering the basis for hemoglobin gene switching and applying those insights to develop a therapy for sickle cell disease and other blood diseases, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania awarded Stuart Orkin, MD the third Elaine Redding Brinster Prize in Science or Medicine. Orkin’s research advanced the understanding of how the fetal hemoglobin gene— the main oxygen carrier protein in the human fetus—is silenced in adults. He also developed a therapy that re-activates the fetal gene for adult hemoglobin gene defects, which cause ...

CORNING, N.Y. | Corning Incorporated | September 15, 2023 - Corning Incorporated (NYSE: GLW) today announced the launch of Corning® Videodrop, an optical technology that applies the principles of interferometric microscopy to quantify the size and concentration of nanoparticles. The latest addition to the company’s growing suite of bioprocessing technology, Videodrop can analyze a solution in less than 60 seconds, and requires only a single 5-10 µl drop of sample material for testing. The technology is capable of collecting a physical titer of viral vectors such as lentivirus, ...

Soft inflatable robots have emerged as a promising paradigm for applications that require inherent safety and adaptability. However, the integration of sensing and control systems in these robots has posed significant challenges without compromising their softness, form factor, or capabilities. Addressing this obstacle, a research team jointly led by Professor Jiyun Kim (Department of New Material Engineering, UNIST) and Professor Jonbum Bae (Department of Mechanical Engineering, UNIST) has developed groundbreaking “soft valve” technology—an all-in-one solution that integrates sensors and control valves while maintaining complete softness. Traditionally, ...

You are what you eat, according to the adage. But it’s not just the body that’s impacted. According to research from UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood can affect food choices, weight gain and even the microstructure of the brain. The study, appearing in Communications Medicine, a Nature journal, finds poor quality of available foods, increased intake of calories from foods high in trans-fatty acids, and environments that do not foster physical activity, all prevalent in disadvantaged neighborhoods, disrupt the flexibility ...

Osaka, Japan – The gene editing technique CRISPR/Cas9 has allowed researchers to make precise and impactful changes to an organism’s DNA to fix mutations that cause genetic disease. However, the CRISPR/Cas9 method can also result in unintended DNA mutations that may have negative effects. Recently, researchers in Japan have developed a new gene editing technique that is as effective as CRISPR/Cas9 while  significantly reducing these unintended mutations. In a new study published in Nature ...