Monica Wojcik, MD, MPH, FAAP, FACMG is the recipient of the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine’s 2025 Dr. Michael S. Watson Genetic and Genomic Medicine Innovation Award—the “Watson Award”—named for the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics’ first and longstanding executive director, Michael S. Watson, MS, PhD, FACMG. “I am incredibly thrilled and humbled to receive this award, and I hope that my career will continue to honor the legacy of Dr. Watson, towards a future where all families can receive the care that they want and need, empowered by genetics and genomics,” said Dr. Wojcik. “The ...

Kiely N. James, PhD, FACMG is the recipient of the 2025 Richard King Trainee Award. This award was instituted by the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine to encourage American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG), international equivalents, or genetic counseling trainees in their careers and to foster the publication of the highest quality research in Genetics in Medicine (GIM), an official journal of the ACMG. Each year the editorial board reviews all articles published in GIM by eligible trainees who were either a first or corresponding author during that year. The manuscript considered to have the ...

Each year, the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine grants its Next Generation Fellowship awards to promising early career professionals in a range of medical genetics and genomics specialties including Clinical Genetics, Clinical Biochemical Genetics, Laboratory Genetics and Genomics, Medical Biochemical Genetics and Ophthalmic Genetics. Support for this year’s class of fellows was generously provided by Bionano, Pfizer, Sanofi, Spark Therapeutics, and Takeda. The ACMG Foundation depends on corporate donations ...

Sensors attached to animals gather valuable data to track and mitigate the human influence on marine life. The Kobe University review paper emphasizes the importance of integrating data from various sources and advocates for an “Internet of Animals” based on open access and shared standards. Humanity influences marine life through a broad range of activities, spanning from fishing and pollution to noise from boats, construction and mining. To enable a sustainable life together, we need to monitor the influence of our activities on marine life and use this ...

Dr. Han Joong Tark's team at KERI's Nano Hybrid Technology Research Center has successfully fabricated ‘functional wires’, which are the foundation of wearable electronic devices, by directly applying the existing synthetic fiber processing methods. Wearable electronic devices, which can be attached to or worn on the body, such as on the wrist, ear, or eyes, have long become a part of our daily lives in various forms like smartwatches, glasses, and earphones. The key to these devices is that they must be lightweight while maintaining long-lasting performance. While there have been various efforts to achieve this, one of the most important elements is the conductive ...

Zeolites and zeotypes are widely used in the energy and chemical industries due to their unique pore structures and excellent shape-selective catalytic properties. However, these inherent advantages also lead to diffusion limitations, preventing guest molecules from effectively accessing internal active sites and thereby hindering catalytic efficiency. In a study published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a research group led by Prof. JIAO Feng and Prof. PAN Xiulian from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed how the accessibility of ...

Published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, the study aimed to provide robust insights into adolescent mental health trajectories in two different cultural contexts by comparing large samples of 11 to 16 years olds in London and Tokyo over time. The two studies are the Tokyo Teen Cohort (TTC) and the Resilience Ethnicity and AdolesCent Mental Health (REACH) cohorts from South London. Both groups collected data in the period 2014 to 2020 and at three different time points as the teenagers grew older.   Researchers used the Short Mood and Feelings ...

An AI-powered robot that can prepare cups of coffee in a busy kitchen could usher in the next generation of intelligent machines, a study suggests. Using a combination of cutting-edge AI, sensitive sensors and fine-tuned motor skills, the robot can interact with its surroundings in more human-like ways than ever before, researchers say. The new technology, developed by a team at the University of Edinburgh, could transform robots’ ability to carry out tasks that previously could only be done by people. While robots are adept at working in tightly controlled settings such as factories ...

  New RNA-based active agents reliably protect plants against the Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), the most common virus in agriculture and horticulture. They were developed by researchers at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). The active ingredients have a broad spectrum effect; a series of RNA molecules support the plant's immune system in combating the virus. In laboratory experiments, 80 to 100 per cent of the treated plants survived an infection with a high viral load, as the team reports in Nucleic Acids Research. Their paper has been selected as a "breakthrough article" by the journal. The researchers are now working ...

A new study by UCLA Health has discovered what researchers say is the first drug to fully reproduce the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in model mice, following from human studies. The findings, published in Nature Communications, tested two candidate drugs derived from their studies on the mechanism of the brain effects of rehabilitation, of which one resulted in significant recovery in movement control after stroke in the mouse model. Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability because most patients do not fully recover from the effects of stroke. There are no drugs in the field of stroke ...

Only around 1 in 10 common non-surgical and non-invasive treatments for lower back pain is effective, suggests a pooled data analysis of the available research, published online in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine. And the pain relief they offer is only marginally better than that achieved with a placebo, the findings indicate. Low back pain is common and debilitating, and 80%-90% of it is categorised as non-specific, because there’s no immediately identifiable cause, note the researchers. Non-surgical and non-invasive ...

Early evidence indicates that the installation of safety nets on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has been successful in reducing the number of suicides at the bridge. The results, published online in the journal Injury Prevention, show a 73% decline in suicides in the 12 months since the nets were completed relative to the number before net installation began. The researchers say their findings “highlight the value of installing nets on this bridge and the importance of barriers as a strategy to prevent suicides by jumping.” The ...

Increased consumption of fruit, dietary fibre, dairy products and caffeine may be associated with a reduced risk of tinnitus (ringing in the ears), suggests an analysis of the available evidence, published in the open access journal BMJ Open. The researchers stress that their findings can’t establish a direct (causal) relationship and should be interpreted with care because of the low quality of the evidence. But they say possible reasons may involve the protective effects of these diets on blood vessels and nerves, as well as their anti-inflammatory ...

Body mass index (BMI) is key method for measuring a person’s weight status, and defining if they have normal weight, overweight, or obesity. However, new research to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2025, Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May) shows that people with obesity at similar BMIs display significant differences in body composition in different body compartments according to their age group, such as higher body fat especially in central regions and lower muscle mass ...

HOUSTON – (March 18, 2025) – Erzsébet Merényi, a statistics research professor at Rice University, and co-investigators at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Pratip Bhattacharya, professor of cancer systems imaging, and Dr. Patrick Pilié, assistant professor of genitourinary medical oncology, were awarded $1 million by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can identify lethal forms of prostate cancer earlier and improve treatment selection. Prostate cancer ...

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality monitors are disproportionally located in predominately white neighborhoods, according to University of Utah research. The EPA’s network consistently failed to capture air quality in communities of color across six major pollutants, particularly lead and sulfur dioxide, followed by ozone and carbon monoxide. EPA regulatory monitors are the key data source driving decisions about pollution reduction, urban planning and public health initiatives. Without equal monitor distribution, the data may misrepresent pollution concentrations, leaving marginalized groups at risk.  “It’s ...

For the second year in a row, Mayo Clinic physician Dr. Parminder Singh has organized a team of riders to raise funds for cancer research while tackling the 32- or 62-mile routes of the Tour de Scottsdale. Singh is a clinical trialist with SWOG Cancer Research Network, a world-renowned organization leading cancer studies across the US and beyond. SWOG trials have led to the approval of 14 cancer drugs, changed more than 100 standards of cancer care, and saved more than 3 million years of human life.  Team Hope’s youngest rider is 11-year-old Misha Rajpal who will take on the full, ...

Autoimmune diseases, which are estimated to affect more than 15 million people in the U.S., occur when the body responds to immune-system false alarms, and infection-fighting first responders are sent out to attack threats that aren’t there. Scientists have long understood how the false alarms get triggered, but the second step of dispatching the immune response has been a mystery. Now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida State University chemists have created a machine learning tool that can identify the chemical composition of dried salt solutions from an image with 99% accuracy. By using robotics to prepare thousands of samples and artificial intelligence to analyze their data, they created a simple, inexpensive tool that could expand possibilities for performing chemical analysis. The work was published in Digital Discovery. “We are living in the age of artificial intelligence and big data,” ...

Fan Zhang, PhD, sees artificial intelligence as a pathway to finding an effective way to combat an intractable enemy: rheumatoid arthritis. Zhang is an assistant professor in the University of Colorado Department of Medicine’s Division of Rheumatology and also is affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Informatics on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. She recently received a highly competitive grant from the Arthritis Foundation to further her work in harnessing AI to better predict the onset of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in particular patients, ...

BALTIMORE, March 18, 2025— A new study led by Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism Services, Science and Innovation (CASSI) finds that a community-based screening model is helping children receive autism diagnoses faster, particularly in underserved communities. The research, published in Pediatric Investigation, highlights how the Rapid Interactive Screening Test for Autism in Toddlers (RITA-T) is making early autism identification more accessible for families facing barriers to care. RITA-T is a quick, interactive tool that assesses developmental skills often delayed in autism, such as social engagement, ...

Women with blood pressure levels in a range considered clinically normal during pregnancy but no mid-pregnancy drop in blood pressure face an increased risk of developing hypertension in the five years after giving birth. These women—about 12% of the population studied—would not be flagged as high-risk by current medical guidelines, but the new findings could help identify them as candidates for early intervention. The findings were just published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, researchers collected data on blood pressure and other health factors ...

Since becoming only the second Alzheimer’s-modifying drug to gain American Federal Drug Administration approval in 2023, sales of lecanemab, known by its brand name Leqembi, have risen steadily, reaching $87-million USD in the last quarter of 2024. In its Phase 3 clinical trial, lecanemab slowed cognitive decline by 27 per cent overall, yet one subset of data suggested little to no benefit in females, though the cause of the difference was not clear. An FDA committee voted unanimously that the Phrase 3 trial verified the clinical benefit of lecanemab. Even so, several follow-up papers focused on the trial’s apparent sex difference result to cast doubt on ...

TAMPA, Fla. (Mar. 18, 2025) — Moffitt Cancer Center researchers have discovered a promising new vaccine strategy for treating a specific type of breast cancer. The innovative approach targets human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive, estrogen receptor-negative (HER2-positive, ER-negative) breast cancer and has shown encouraging results in a recent pilot study. Published in npj Breast Cancer, the study combined the HER2-targeting dendritic cell vaccines with standard chemotherapy, demonstrating both safety and positive response rates. The study enrolled 30 patients with stage 2 and stage 3 HER2-positive, ...

Toronto - Despite a very uncertain economic climate, investors can at least feel confident that audited financial reports are more reliable thanks to the spread of international standards. New research led by a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management shows that the quality of financial audits increasing in countries which have adopted the International Standards on Auditing, or ISA, issued through the International Federation of Accountants, the accounting profession’s worldwide body. “We show improvement in audit quality, on average,” said researcher Ole-Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting at the Rotman School. However, ...