Two University of Kentucky researchers continue their work with a vaccine to prevent lung cancer recurrences in patients following primary treatment of the disease.

Vaccines are being developed with the hope of reducing the unacceptably high rates of recurrence and disease progression seen in the treated lung cancer population. The cancer vaccine program is now enrolling a second cohort of subjects to study the effects of the vaccine in lung cancer patients. The vaccine is deliver

New mothers who are mildly iron deficient — a common result of childbirth among women who don’t take their vitamins — are less emotionally available or in tune with their babies, a Penn State study has shown.

Dr. Laura Murray-Kolb, a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellow in child development at Penn State who led the study says, “Earlier research had shown that anemic women may experience post-partum depression and that women with moderate iron deficiency h

Psychiatrists are doing a “modest” job of monitoring for weight gain, diabetes and other metabolic problems that may result from use of the newer antipsychotics for schizophrenia, researchers say.

Nearly all of the 258 members of the American Psychiatric Association in Georgia, Ohio and Iowa responding to a survey said they considered metabolic side effects serious or very serious, say researchers from the Medical College of Georgia, University of Iowa and Northcoast Behavioral

Non-Invasive and Safe, a New USC System Images and Differentiates Soft Tissue With Unprecedented Detail and Precision
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering have successfully demonstrated a novel “High-resolution Ultrasonic Transmission Tomography” (HUTT) system fthat offers 3D images of soft tissue that are superior to those produced by existing commercial X-ray, ultrasound or MRI units.

Vasilis Marmarelis, a professor of biomedi

Three University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston faculty members are co-authors of an article in the April 6 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. The article reports study results suggesting older, cheaper diuretics remain the drug of choice for both black and non-black patients in treating high blood pressure and reducing risk of heart disease.

The analysis by race of the “Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial”

Asthmatics produce lower levels of a type of immune cell protein needed to fight off infection from colds and other viruses, scientists have discovered.

The finding reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, helps to explain why asthmatics are more susceptible to respiratory virus infections — the cause of the vast majority of acute asthma attacks in both adults and children.

The researchers, from Imperial College London and University of

A University of Liverpool vet has developed a new food for dogs to help relieve the pain of canine osteoarthritis (OA).

Professor John Innes, from the University’s Department of Veterinary Clinical Science, has been working with colleagues at the University of Cardiff to create the specialist diet that can alleviate the discomfort caused by the condition, as well as potentially slow down the long-term development of OA in dogs.

OA mainly affects larger breeds of dog,

A team of researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has developed new miniature sensors for analysing DNA. The sensors have the same size and thickness as a fingernail and reduce the time needed to identify DNA chains to several minutes or a few hours, depending on each chain. These sensors can be applied to many different tasks, ranging from paternity tests and identifying people to detecting genetically modified food, identifying bacterial strains in foodborne illnesses and testing g

Ebola virus infection in humans provokes a violent haemorrhagic fever. It usually flares up as intense epidemics. These kill 80 % of the people infected. Seven such outbreaks have hit Gabon and the Republic of Congo since 1994, leading to 445 cases resulting in 361 deaths. Ebola virus thus constitutes a grave public health problem in these countries. No medicine or vaccine is currently available, only prevention and rapid control of epidemics by isolation of disease victims can limit its spread

Provides unique drug targets to prevent spread

Tufts University researchers have identified several proteins on the surface of cancer cells that contribute to the cells’ ability to metastasize. When the researchers destroyed these particular proteins, the cancerous cells show a significant decrease in their ability to invade healthy cells – a finding that provides a new target for badly needed drugs. Although most cancer deaths occur from metastasis, not from the original canc

And it creates resistance to weight gain and lowered inflammation

The Salk Institute scientist who earlier discovered that enhancing the function of a single protein produced a mouse with an innate resistance to weight gain and the ability to run a mile without stopping has found new evidence that this protein and a related protein play central roles in the body’s complex journey to obesity and offer a new and specific metabolic approach to the treatment of obesity related dise

Tumor cells use VEGF-A to stimulate lymphatic vessel growth beyond primary site

Production of the protein VEGF-A, already known to stimulate the growth of blood vessels associated with tumors, also contributes in unexpected ways to the spread of cancer. In the April Journal of Experimental Medicine, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology describe finding that VEGF-A promotes the development of lymphatic vessels that can

May lead to improved diagnosis and prevention of stomach-esophagus cancer

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a chain of molecular signals that generate the specialized lining of the stomach during fetal development – a discovery that could lead to better diagnosis, treatment and prevention of stomach and esophageal cancer in adults.

Damage to the stomach lining, such as from acid reflux or helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infections, might reactiva

Collaborating researchers at New York University and Rockefeller University have discovered that microRNA genes, which have recently been shown to have key roles in gene regulation, can team up and regulate target genes in mammals. MicroRNAs are a recently discovered large class of regulatory, non-coding genes, which bind to partially complementary sites in target messenger RNA to regulate their stability and translation. However, little has been known about the biological function of microRNAs–a pr

Researchers at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine have taken another step toward a potential treatment for Huntington’s disease (HD). Using an approach called RNA interference (RNAi), the scientists reduced levels of the disease-causing HD protein in mice and significantly improved the movement and neurological abnormalities normally associated with the disease.

HD is a devastating, inherited, neurodegenerative disease that is progressive

Researchers have discovered that natural killer T (NKT) cells, the immune system’s sentinels, patrol the labyrinthine blood vessels of the liver for invaders or signs of tissue damage and demonstrate a dogged behavior not seen before in other T cells.

The new studies show that NKT cells crawl along vessel walls, even upstream against blood flow. They halt only when they receive a chemical signal to unleash an immune-system assault on marauding microbes, other invaders or dam