VIDEO: Claudia Gravekamp, Ph.D., discusses her research on a new therapy for pancreatic cancer that uses Listeria bacteria to selectively infect tumor cells and deliver radioisotopes into them. Dr. Gravekamp is... Click here for more information. April 22, 2013 — (BRONX, NY) — Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a therapy for pancreatic cancer that uses Listeria bacteria to selectively infect tumor cells and deliver radioisotopes ...

As many as one in 50 people around the world is infected with some type of hepacivirus or pegivirus, including up to 200 million with hepatitis C virus (HCV), a leading cause of liver failure and liver cancer. There has been speculation that these agents arose in wildlife and jumped species to infect humans; however, little was known about their distribution in other species. In two new papers published in the journals mBio and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University's Mailman ...

The disrupted metabolism of sugar, fat and calcium is part of the process that causes the death of neurons in Alzheimer's disease. Researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now shown, for the first time, how important parts of the nerve cell that are involved in the cell's energy metabolism operate in the early stages of the disease. These somewhat surprising results shed new light on how neuronal metabolism relates to the development of the disease. In the Alzheimer's disease brain, plaques consisting of so called amyloid-beta-peptide (Aβ) are accumulated. ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a method of predicting which patients with heart disease would benefit more from surgery and which would benefit more from angioplasty. Drawing on Medicare records of more than 100,000 patients with heart disease, the team demonstrated that the effectiveness of coronary bypass surgery varied widely based on each individual's characteristics. The data enabled them to predict which type of intervention — coronary bypass surgery or coronary angioplasty — increased the chances of an ...

LA JOLLA, CA – April 22, 2013 – In a serendipitous discovery, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to turn bone marrow stem cells directly into brain cells. Current techniques for turning patients' marrow cells into cells of some other desired type are relatively cumbersome, risky and effectively confined to the lab dish. The new finding points to the possibility of simpler and safer techniques. Cell therapies derived from patients' own cells are widely expected to be useful in treating spinal cord injuries, strokes and other conditions ...

Nearly thirty-four million years ago, the Earth underwent a transformation from a warm and high-carbon dioxide "greenhouse" state to a lower-CO2, variable climate of the modern "icehouse" world. Massive ice sheets grew across the Antarctic continent, major animal groups shifted, and ocean temperatures decreased by up to 5 degrees. But studies of how this drastic change affected temperatures on land have had mixed results. Some show no appreciable terrestrial climate change; others find cooling of up to 8 degrees and large changes in seasonality. Now, a group of American ...

Ocean biology alters the chemical composition of sea spray in ways that influence their ability to form clouds over the ocean. That's the conclusion of a team of scientists using a new approach to study tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols that can influence climate by absorbing or reflecting sunlight and seeding clouds. "After many decades of attempting to understand how the ocean impacts the atmosphere and clouds above it, it became clear a new approach was needed to investigate the complex ocean-atmosphere system—so moving the chemical complexity of the ocean ...

Long-term use of highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) does not appear to be associated with impaired heart function in children and adolescents in a study that sought to determine the cardiac effects of prolonged exposure to HAART on children infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), according to a report published Online First by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Prior to contemporary antiretroviral therapies (ARTs), children infected with HIV were more likely to have heart failure. Steven E. Lipshultz, M.D., of the University of Miami ...

A matched cohort study by William W. Hung, M.D., M.P.H., of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues examined the use of the Mobile Acute Care of the Elderly (MACE) service compared with general medical service (usual care). (Online First) Patients were recruited for the study if they were 75 years or older and were admitted because of an acute illness to either the MACE service, a novel model of care delivered by an interdisciplinary team and designed to deliver specialized care to hospitalized older adults to improve patient outcomes, or usual care. ...

In reviewing 25 years of U.S. malpractice claim payouts, Johns Hopkins researchers found that diagnostic errors — not surgical mistakes or medication overdoses — accounted for the largest fraction of claims, the most severe patient harm, and the highest total of penalty payouts. Diagnosis-related payments amounted to $38.8 billion between 1986 and 2010, they found. "This is more evidence that diagnostic errors could easily be the biggest patient safety and medical malpractice problem in the United States," says David E. Newman-Toker, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor ...

Predicting the winner of a sporting event with accuracy close to that of a statistical computer programme could be possible with proper training, according to researchers. In a study published today, experiment participants who had been trained on statistically idealised data vastly improved their ability to predict the outcome of a baseball game. In normal situations, the brain selects a limited number of memories to use as evidence to guide decisions. As real-world events do not always have the most likely outcome, retrieved memories can provide misleading information ...

Alternative therapies such as aerobic exercise, resistance or strength training, and isometric hand grip exercises may help reduce your blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association. In a new scientific statement published in its journal Hypertension, the association said alternative approaches could help people with blood pressure levels higher than 120/80 mm Hg and those who can't tolerate or don't respond well to standard medications. However, alternative therapies shouldn't replace proven methods to lower blood pressure — including physical activity, ...

New results from a retrospective study conducted in Europe suggest that anti-HER2 treatments, like the widely used breast cancer agent trastuzumab (Herceptin), have anti-cancer effects in a small subset of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring specific HER2 protein mutations. Although genetic changes cause tumor cells to make too much of the HER2 protein in up to 20% of lung cancers, mutations in the HER2 gene occur in only 1-2% of lung cancers. Such mutations in the HER2 gene lead to continuous activation of the protein, which keeps tumor ...

Researchers from Dartmouth's Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (iQBS) and the Center for Genomic Medicine have helped to discover three unique genetic variations that influence body size and obesity in men and women of African ancestry. This study, a meta-analysis that examined 3.2 million genetic variants in over 30,000 people with African heritage for links to body-mass index or BMI—by professors Jason Moore, Christopher Amos and Scott Williams—was the largest ever done on this population to date. The study was published online in April 2013 by Nature Genetics, ...

Scientists from The University of Manchester have identified 14 new genes which could have important consequences for future treatments of childhood arthritis. Scientists Dr Anne Hinks, Dr Joanna Cobb and Professor Wendy Thomson, from the University's Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, whose work is published in Nature Genetics yesterday (21 April), looked at DNA extracted from blood and saliva samples of 2,000 children with childhood arthritis and compared these to healthy people. Principal Investigator Professor Thomson, who also leads the Inflammatory Arthritis ...

DENVER – Lung cancer is one of the most common primary cancers that cause leptomeningeal carcinomatosis (LMC), when cancer spreads to the membranes surrounding the spinal cord and brain. Cases of LMC have increased because of the improved survival of lung cancer patients with the help of new advances in treatment. This is the type of cancer diagnosis facingValerie Harper, who played Rhonda on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Now research published in the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO) shows the effectiveness of ...

DENVER – The identification of potentially targetable kinase mutations has been an exciting advancement in lung cancer treatment. Although the mutations driving many lung carcinomas remain unknown, approximately 50 percent of lung adenocarcinoma cases harbor KRAS mutation, EGFR mutation, or ALK translocation, and an additional 5 percent or so have been shown to have mutations involving BRAF, PIK3CA, HER2, MET, MEK1, NRAS, and AKT. In the vast majority, these driver mutations are mutually exclusive. But in a recent study published in the International Association for the ...

DENVER – Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths and is tied as the third leading cause of death overall in industrialized countries. Within the United States, several groups identified by race, sex, and socioeconomic status have been linked to increased cancer mortality, suggesting a disparity because of these characteristics. The relationships are complicated by the fact that many of these characteristics may also be associated with areas of decreased access to care and local resources and not inherently based on implicit biases. Researchers from ...

Cambridge, Mass. - April 22, 2013 - A Harvard-led team of researchers has created a new type of nanoscale device that converts an optical signal into waves that travel along a metal surface. Significantly, the device can recognize specific kinds of polarized light and accordingly send the signal in one direction or another. The findings, published in the April 19 issue of Science, offer a new way to precisely manipulate light at the subwavelength scale without damaging a signal that could carry data. This opens the door to a new generation of on-chip optical interconnects ...

As climate studies saturate scientific journals and mainstream media, with opposing viewpoints quickly squaring off in reaction and debate, new findings can easily be lost in the noise. But in the case of Northern Arizona University Regents' professor Darrell Kaufman and a study appearing in Nature Geoscience, obscurity is an unlikely fate. What Kaufman—the lead co-author of "Continental-scale temperature variability during the last two millennia"—and 78 experts from 24 countries have done is to assemble the most comprehensive study to date of temperature change of ...

In a small study of 39 primary care doctors and 208 of their patients, Johns Hopkins researchers have found that physicians built much less of an emotional rapport with their overweight and obese patients than with their patients of normal weight. Bonding and empathy are essential to the patient-physician relationship. When physicians express more empathy, studies have shown that patients are more likely to adhere to medical recommendations and respond to behavior-change counseling — all vital elements in helping overweight and obese patients lose weight and improve ...

(Edmonton) University of Alberta led research reveals that Microraptor, a small flying dinosaur was a complete hunter, able to swoop down and pickup fish as well as its previously known prey of birds and tree dwelling mammals. U of A paleontology graduate student Scott Persons says new evidence of Microrpator's hunting ability came from fossilized remains in China. "We were very fortunate that this Microraptor was found in volcanic ash and its stomach content of fish was easily identified." Prior to this, paleontologists believed microraptors which were about the size ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Scavengers might not play as key a role in spreading anthrax through wildlife populations as previously assumed, according to findings from a small study conducted in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia. Wildlife managers currently spend large amounts of money and time to control anthrax outbreaks by preventing scavengers from feeding on infected carcasses. The effort might be ill spent, according to results published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology by an international consortium of researchers led by Steven Bellan, an ecologist at The ...

DURHAM, NC -- Drug developers may have a new tool to search for more effective medications and new materials. It's a computer algorithm that can model and catalogue the entire set of lightweight, carbon-containing molecules that chemists could feasibly create in a lab. The small-molecule universe has more than 10^60 (that's 1 with 60 zeroes after it) chemical structures. Duke chemist David Beratan said that many of the world's problems have molecular solutions in this chemical space, whether it's a cure for disease or a new material to capture sunlight. But, he said, ...

An international team of neuroscientists has described for the first time in exhaustive detail the underlying neurobiology of an amnesiac who suffered from profound memory loss after damage to key portions of his brain. Writing in this week's Online Early Edition of PNAS, principal investigator Larry R. Squire, PhD, professor in the departments of Neurosciences, Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veteran Affairs San Diego Healthcare System (VASDHS) – with colleagues at UC Davis and the University of Castilla-La ...