UC San Diego Health is the first hospital system in the region to offer a new immunotherapy treatment for metastatic melanoma. The personalized cellular therapy derived from tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL), is the first solid tumor therapy on the market approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  “This one-time cellular immunotherapy is a powerful and robust tool to treat patients with advanced melanoma resistant to other approved therapies and who have limited treatment options,” said Gregory Daniels, MD, PhD, professor of ...

By Jake Siegel SEATTLE, WASH.—June 4, 2024—New research by scientists at the Allen Institute’s Brain and Consciousness group and Cedars-Sinai offers an unprecedented look at how neurons respond to ES. Far from being uniform, different types of neurons showed distinct patterns of ‘syncing up’ with electrical fields. These patterns varied depending on the rate at which the ES was delivered. The findings, published today in Neuron, could help doctors fine tune where, when, and how ...

Researchers from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, University of Chicago, and Management Development Institute, Gurgaon published a new Journal of Marketing study that examines the unintended consequences of an Indian government healthcare policy. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Do No Harm? Unintended Consequences of Pharmaceutical Price Regulation in India” and is authored by Saravana Jaikumar, Pradeep K. Chintagunta, and Arvind Sahay. In countries without universal health insurance or developed health care systems, governments try to make drugs affordable and accessible. For instance, ...

Maternal obesity impacts the eating behaviors of offspring via long-term overexpression of the microRNA miR-505-5p, according to a study publishing June 4th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Laura Dearden and Susan Ozanne from the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues. Previous studies in both humans and animal models have shown that the offspring of obese mothers have a higher risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes. While this relationship is likely the result of a complex relationship between genetics and environment, emerging ...

Clinicians often default to treating mental health conditions with a variety of medication. This approach, however, largely ignores the role of environment, lifestyle, and social factors. Mental Health professionals must work toward a more holistic management picture, Sidarta Ribeiro, Ana Paula Pimentel, Paulo Amarante and colleagues at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and FIOCRUZ in Brazil argue in the new open-access journal PLOS Mental Health on June 4. More people than ever are being diagnosed with mental health conditions—particularly children and young adults. The World Health Organization estimates that mental health ...

Max Chang and Irene Lee of University College London review neuroimaging studies of the effects of internet addiction on adolescent brains. Published June 4 in PLOS Mental Health, the study indicates that internet addiction is associated with disrupted signaling in the regions of the brain that are involved in multiple neural networks. These networks play an important role in controlling our attention, in association with intellectual ability, working memory, physical coordination, and emotional processing—all of which ...

A new survey of nearly 340,000 texts spanning 79 years shows that generic terms in mental health have shifted away from words like “disease” and “disturbance” and toward “psychiatric” and “mental health,” with “mental illness” becoming the most-used term. Nick Haslam and Naomi Baes at the University of Melbourne in Australia present these findings in the new open-access journal PLOS Mental Health on June 4. The authors state that while words such as “crazy” and “lunatic” ...

Sarah Jackson and colleagues from University College London and King’s College London branches of the SPECTRUM Consortium conducted a survey to study how mental health relates to methods people use to quit smoking, also known as smoking cessation aids. While the number of adults who smoke cigarettes has declined globally, people with mental health conditions are more likely to smoke and to do so more heavily. Because of these differences in tobacco use, the researchers theorized that the effectiveness of smoking cessation aids may be altered in individuals with a mental health condition. However, in their ...

Lived experience should be centered in future mental health research, say people with mental health conditions and their families and carers in nationwide Australian survey. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmen.0000010 Article Title: Experience is central and connections matter: A Leximancer analysis of the research priorities of people with lived experience of mental health issues in Australia Author Countries: Australia Funding: The ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation is supported by a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council (GNT2002047) ...

Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behaviour and tendencies, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The findings, published in PLOS Mental Health, reviewed 12 articles involving 237 young people aged 10-19 with a formal diagnosis of internet addiction between 2013 and 2023. Internet addiction has been defined as a person’s inability to resist the urge to use the internet, negatively impacting their psychological wellbeing, as well as their social, academic and professional lives. The studies used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to inspect the functional connectivity (how regions of ...

Every spring when the sun rises in the Arctic after months of darkness, life returns. The polar bears pop up from their winter lairs, the arctic tern soar back from their long journey south and the musk oxen wade north.  But the animals are not the only life being reawakened by the spring sun. Algae lying dormant on the ice starts blooming in spring blackening large areas of the ice. When the ice blackens it’s ability to reflect the sun diminishes and this accelerates the melting of the ice. Increased melting exacerbates global ...

WHAT:         The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 2024 Annual Meeting The field of nuclear medicine is undergoing rapid and widespread growth—offering patients increasingly precise, tailored, painless diagnosis and treatment with minimal side effects and exceptional results. This year’s program will focus on new radiopharmaceuticals, instrumentation, and techniques for managing a wide range of diseases, from cancer, brain, and heart disease to infection and inflammation. The meeting will convene more than 6,500 attendees from around the globe. With more than 100 ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The end of the Second World War ushered in a new age, one dominated by novel technologies, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear destruction — and the first reported UFO sightings. Humans have witnessed strange aerial events since ancient times, but what makes UFOs unique is that the term “unidentified flying object” represents both a concept and a theory, according to Greg Eghigian, professor of history and bioethics at Penn State. In his new book, “After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon,” Eghigian explores how individuals, scientists, governments ...

Feelings of loneliness and social isolation during the pandemic left many people confused about the order of events and struggling to remember what day of the week it was, a new study reveals.   The research, from the University of York, looked at the psychological impact of the pandemic, which spread to the UK in March 2020, through the lens of disorientation.     The researchers asked more than 3,300 French participants nearly 60 questions analysing the psychological effects of lockdowns. The survey took place during an acute phase of restrictions when there was a lockdown followed by a strict curfew.    The findings ...

WHAT: Two clinical trials have launched to examine a novel long-acting form of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in cisgender women and people who inject drugs. The mid-stage studies will assess the safety, acceptability, and pharmacokinetic (how a drug moves through the body) of lenacapavir, an antiretroviral drug administered by injection every six months. The studies are sponsored and funded by Gilead Sciences, Inc., and implemented through the HIV Prevention Trails Network (HPTN). The HPTN is supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Winters can be tough on managed honey bee colonies, with beekeepers in the United States reporting that one-third of their colonies die each winter. A new study by Penn State researchers has found that using not one but multiple pest treatments may help bees make it to spring. The researchers found that beekeepers who used a combination of treatments for Varroa mites — tiny parasites that can weaken and spread diseases to honey bees — had higher winter colony survival than those who used only one type of treatment. The findings were published in the Journal of Insect Science. Additionally, ...

Getting into graduate school to become a doctor or a dentist is difficult. By some estimates, only about 37% to 42% of students who apply to medical or dental school are accepted. To help pre-medical and -dental students achieve their dreams, UT Arlington created a program called the Health Professions Advisory Committee (HPAC). The odds of graduate school admission for students participating in HPAC is significantly higher than average, with an estimated 85% succeeding. This is just one of several UT Arlington initiatives helping alleviate ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A 15-year period ending in 2020 that included a marine heat wave and a sea star wasting disease epidemic saw major changes in the groups of organisms that live along the rocky shores of the Pacific Northwest. The study by Oregon State University scientists, involving four capes in Oregon and California, suggests these communities of species may have low resilience to climate change. Findings were published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution and. Researchers learned that ...

Imagine pulling on the long ends of a rectangular piece of rubber. It should become narrower and thinner.  But what if, instead, it got wider and fatter? Now, push in on those same ends. What if the rubber became narrower and thinner? Such common-sense-defying materials do exist. They’re called auxetics, and they have a raft of unique properties that make them well-suited for sneaker insoles, bomb-resilient buildings, car bumpers and clothing. Despite this great potential, auxetic products have been slow to market. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Chicago hope to change this. In a new study published ...

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is hosting a free webinar, “Neurocognitively-Defined Subtypes in Bipolar Disorder: A Path to More Personalized Treatments” on Tuesday, June 11, 2024, at 2:00 pm ET. The presenter, Katherine E. Burdick, PhD, is the Jonathan F. Borus, MD Distinguished Chair in Psychiatry and the Vice Chair for Research in Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is the Director of the Mood and Psychosis Research Program at BWH and a Professor at Harvard Medical ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Polarized light waves spin clockwise or counterclockwise as they travel, with one direction behaving differently than the other as it interacts with molecules. This directionality, called chirality or handedness, could provide a way to identify and sort specific molecules for use in biomedicine applications, but researchers have had limited control over the direction of the waves — until now.    Using metamaterials, a team of electrical engineering researchers from Penn State and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln ...

PHILADELPHIA — (June 04, 2024) — Advanced clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is a deadly form of kidney cancer with few treatment options; even with new immunotherapies, only around one in 10 patients ultimately survive.  Antibody therapies called bispecific T cell engagers (BTEs) have emerged as effective treatments for some blood cancers but have been more difficult to develop for solid tumors. While clinically successful, first-generation BTEs suffer a short half-life. Now, Wistar scientists have built upon BTE technology to develop new and improved recombinant and synthetic ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have shown for the first time that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can remain in the sperm of patients for up to 90 days after hospital discharge and up to 110 days after the initial infection, reducing semen quality. The study is reported in an article published in the journal Andrology. The authors suggest that people who plan to have children should observe a period of “quarantine” after recovering ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new method for detecting defects in additively manufactured components. One of the most important tasks in any factory is to determine whether a manufactured component is free of defects. In additive manufacturing (3D printing), it can be particularly challenging to find defects, because additive manufacturing can make components that have complex three-dimensional shapes and important internal features that are not easily observed. The novel technology uses deep machine ...

TREX1 is a gene that is supposed to direct the maintenance of the entire body’s DNA, but new research shows that when people are born with mutated TREX1, it causes catastrophic damage to the DNA over time, resulting in a deadly rare disease called retinal vasculopathy with cerebral leukoencephalopathy (RVCL). Published in Nature Communications, the research was led by teams at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Brain Research Institute at Niigata University in Japan. While it was already known that a mutation in TREX1 was behind RVCL, the mechanism by which ...