LA JOLLA, Calif., September 16, 2013 – Scientists at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) today announced the discovery that a gene encoding an enzyme, phosphoinositide-dependent kinase-1 (PDK1), plays an essential role in the development and progression of melanoma. The finding offers a new approach to treating this life-threatening disease. The team of researchers, led by Ze'ev Ronai, Ph.D., professor and scientific director of Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla (San Diego, Calif.), used genetic mouse melanoma models to show ...

Researchers at the Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a biomarker that can predict diabetes risk up to 10 years before onset of the disease. Thomas J. Wang, M.D., director of the Division of Cardiology at Vanderbilt, along with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, report their findings in the October issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The researchers conducted a study of 188 individuals who developed type 2 diabetes mellitus and 188 individuals without diabetes who were followed for 12 years ...

Humberto is the second "zombie" tropical storm of the Atlantic Ocean season. That is, it's the second tropical storm that degenerated into a remnant low pressure area only to make a comeback as a tropical storm. NASA's HS3 hurricane mission sent an unmanned Global Hawk Aircraft out to the eastern Atlantic to investigate Humberto on Sept. 16. On Sunday, Sept. 15, Humberto weakened to a remnant low pressure area when it hit an area of strong wind shear. The wind shear eased and Humberto regained tropical storm strength on Sept. 16, making it the second "zombie" storm in ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Two assistant professors of management at the University of California, Riverside and several other researchers have previously shown that men with wider faces are more aggressive, less trustworthy and more prone to engaging in deception. Now, in a just-published paper, they have shown, in a series of four studies, that individuals behave more selfishly when interacting with men with wider faces and this selfish behavior elicits selfish behavior in others. "This clearly shows that this behavior is also socially driven, not just biologically driven," ...

A group of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher have confirmed that life really could have come from out of this world. The team shock compressed an icy mixture, similar to what is found in comets, which then created a number of amino acids – the building blocks of life. The research appears in advanced online publication Sept. 15 on the Nature Geosciences journal website. This is the first experimental confirmation of what LLNL scientist Nir Goldman first predicted in 2010 and again in 2013 using computer simulations ...

LEBANON, NH (Sept. 16, 2013) – Consumers should be wary when watching those advertisements for pharmaceuticals on the nightly TV news, as six out of 10 claims could potentially mislead the viewer, say researchers in an article published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Researchers Adrienne E. Faerber of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice and David H. Kreling of The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy found that potentially misleading claims are prevalent throughout consumer-targeted prescription and non-prescription ...

LA JOLLA, CA—September 16, 2013—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to make dramatic improvements to the cancer cell-killing power of vinblastine, one of the most successful chemotherapy drugs of the past few decades. The team's modified versions of vinblastine showed 10 to 200 times greater potency than the clinical drug. Even more significantly, these new compounds overcome the drug resistance that emerges upon treatment relapse, which renders continued or subsequent vinblastine treatment ineffective in some patients. The TSRI researchers ...

A multi-institutional team of engineers has developed a new approach to the fabrication of nanostructures for the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries. This approach combines top-down advanced ink-jet printing technology with a bottom-up approach that involves self-assembling block copolymers, a type of material that can spontaneously form ultrafine structures. The team, consisting of nine researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago and Hanyang University in Korea, was able to increase the resolution of their intricate ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 16, 2013—If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone. A social networking counter movement is emerging, and Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways, as described in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website. Stefan ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — When public health budgets are constrained, mammography screening should begin later and occur less frequently, a cost-effectiveness analysis for California's Every Woman Counts (EWC) program concludes. As outlined in a paper published in Value in Health, the analysis focused on several policy questions, including the effect on EWC program costs and outcomes of starting screening at age 50 years instead of 40 and of screening every two years instead of every year. The study was conducted in response to recent government funding cutbacks. "This ...

When a person has cancer, some of the cells in his or her body have changed and are growing uncontrollably. Most cancer drugs try to treat the disease by killing those fast-growing cells, but another approach called immunotherapy tries to stimulate a person's own immune system to attack the cancer itself. Now, scientists at the University of Washington have developed a strategy to slow tumor growth and prolong survival in mice with cancer by targeting and destroying a type of cell that dampens the body's immune response to cancer. The researchers published their findings ...

Hospitalizations for endocarditis, a deadly heart infection that disproportionately affects older heart patients, have declined in recent years despite recommendations for limited use of antibiotics to prevent the illness. These findings were recently published by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Endocarditis is the most serious infection of the cardiovascular system, and the risk increases with surgical procedures. Past studies showed a marked increase in endocarditis hospitalization rates during the 1990s. As ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 16, 2013) – A "vicious cycle" produces mucus that protects uterine and pancreatic cancer cells and promotes their proliferation, according to researchers at Rice University. The researchers offer hope for a therapeutic solution. They found that protein receptors on the surface of cancer cells go into overdrive to stimulate the production of MUC1, a glycoprotein that forms mucin, aka mucus. It covers the exposed tips of the elongated epithelial cells that coat internal organs like lungs, stomachs and intestines to protect them from infection. But when ...

AUDIO: Researchers from around the world, led by scientists at the Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan School of Public Gealth, have identified a... Click here for more information. An international team of researchers, led by scientists at The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, has identified a gene mutation ...

The risk of death following bone marrow transplantation can be reduced about 60 percent using a new technique to identify bone marrow donors who make the most potent cancer-fighting immune cells, according to research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The findings appear in the September 16 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The research builds on an earlier St. Jude discovery that specialized immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells dispatched cancer cells more efficiently when the NK cells carried a particular version of a KIR protein on ...

Arginine therapy may be a safe and inexpensive treatment for acute pain episodes in patients with sickle cell disease, according to results of a recent clinical study. The study was the first randomized placebo-controlled study to demonstrate benefits of arginine therapy in children with sickle cell disease hospitalized for severe pain. Sickle cell disease is an inherited condition in which the body makes red blood cells containing abnormal hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to other cells in the body. This abnormal hemoglobin (hemoglobin S) causes ...

Troy, N.Y. – A computational model developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is the first to accurately simulate the complex twists of a short sequence of RNA as it folds into a critical hairpin structure known as a "tetraloop." The research, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a glimpse into RNA, found in all life on Earth, and could advance a variety of research areas, including the search for new antibiotics and cures for protein-related diseases. Existing computational models, based on DNA rather than RNA, do not ...

Reliable quantum computing would make it possible to solve certain types of extremely complex technological problems millions of times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Other types of problems that quantum computing could tackle would not even be feasible with today's fastest machines. The key word is "reliable." If the enormous potential of quantum computing is to be fully realized, scientists must learn to create "fault-tolerant" quantum computers. A small but important step toward this goal has been achieved by an international collaboration of researchers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research shows that microRNA-486 is a potent tumor-suppressor molecule in lung cancer, and that the it helps regulate the proliferation and migration of lung-cancer cells, and the induction of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, in those cells. The preclinical study was led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). It found that microRNA-486 (miR-486) directly targets the insulin growth-factor pathway, which is important for ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal September 17, 2013 – Chest pain is recognized as a symptom of heart troubles, but one out of five women aged 55 years or less having a heart attack do not experience this symptom, according to a study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC). The research findings, gathered from partner institutions across Canada including the University of British Columbia (UBC), are the first to describe this phenomenon in young women. The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, has ...

The risk of becoming a smoker among young adults who have never smoked is high: 14% will become smokers between the ages of 18 and 24, and three factors predict this behaviour. "Smoking initiation also occurs among young adults, and in particular among those who are impulsive, have poor grades, or who use alcohol regularly," said Jennifer O'Loughlin, a Professor at the University of Montreal School of Public Health (ESPUM) and author of a Journal of Adolescent Health study published in August. O'Loughlin believes smoking prevention campaigns should also target young adults ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – Patients having knee MRI examinations are significantly more likely to receive a negative finding if referred by physicians who have a financial interest in the imaging equipment being used, according to a study published online in the journal Radiology. Imaging self-referral, whereby a non-radiologist physician refers their own patients for imaging to facilities in which they or their partners have a financial interest, is a growing trend in medicine and a significant driver of healthcare costs. Medical imaging self-referral leads to higher utilization ...

PHILADELPHIA — A protein called isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH1) is present at high levels in lung cancers and can be detected in the blood, making it a noninvasive diagnostic marker for lung cancers, according to a study published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "This study is the first to report identification of IDH1 as a novel biomarker for the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC) using a large number of clinical samples," said Jie He, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Laboratory of Thoracic Surgery at ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 17, 2013 – A new study reports that workers exposed to crude oil and dispersants used during the Gulf oil spill cleanup display significantly altered blood profiles, liver enzymes, and somatic symptoms compared to an unexposed control group. Investigators found that platelet counts were significantly decreased in the exposed group, while both hemoglobin and hematocrit levels were notably increased. Their findings, reported in The American Journal of Medicine, suggest that oil spill cleanup workers are at risk for developing hepatic or blood-related ...

TORONTO, September 17, 2013 – A review study published today finds that financial incentives –as modest as $5 per week – can increase the amount of exercise people do. Lead author Marc Mitchell, University of Toronto PhD candidate and Cardiac Rehabilitation Supervisor at Toronto Rehab, worked under the leadership of University of Toronto exercise psychologist Guy Faulkner and exercise physiologist Jack Goodman to publish these findings in the September online publication of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The review study looked at 1,500 patients. "The ...