Medicine

Recent breakthroughs in common adult leukemia highlighted in New England Journal of Medicine

When the most common adult leukemia in the United States was last reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1995, it was seen through the eyes of theories that dated back to the 1960s. As such, the journal recently invited three of the world's foremost experts on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to write an authoritative update covering the transformation in the scientific commu...

Leukemia Drug Breakthrough Study In New England Journal Of Medicine

Alan List, M.D., leader of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, recently conducted a phase I/II trial of the experimental drug Revlimid showing promise as an innovative way to treat patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a form of pre-leukemia. Given in pill form, Revlimid simultaneously blocks the growth of new blood vessels th...

Transport System Smuggles Medicines Into Brain

Parrots, long a favorite pet animal, are attractive to owners because of their vibrant colors. But those colors may mean more to parrots than what meets the eye. For more than a century, biochemists have known that parrots use an unusual set of pigments to produce their rainbow of plumage colors, but their biochemical identity has remained elusive. Now, an Arizona State University researc...

Papers of DNA Pioneer and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick Added to National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in Science Web Site

The National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health, is proud to present an extensive selection from the papers of one of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, Francis Crick, on its Profiles in Science Web site. Don't miss Crick's This la...

Affymetrix and the Karolinska Institutet Announce Translational Medicine Strategic Alliance

Affymetrix Inc. (Nasdaq: AFFX - News) and Karolinska Institutet announced today that they have entered into a strategic alliance designed to improve healthcare by accelerating the translation of basic genetic research into tools for better diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. During the next five years the projects include genetic analyses and measurement of gene expression in patients wi...

FDA Works To Speed The Advent Of New, More Effective Personalized Medicines

As part of an agency-wide initiative to speed development of new medical products through the science of pharmacogenomics, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today issued a final guidance titled "Pharmacogenomic Data Submissions." Pharmacogenomics allows health care providers to identify sources of an individual's profile of drug response and predict the best possible treatment option...

Genpathway and Baylor College of Medicine Identify New Genes in Breast Cancer

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have succeeded in mapping the unique patterns of neural activity produced by a wide range of odors, including vanilla, skunk, fish, urine, musk, and chocolate. Revealing these distinct ?but often overlapping ?patterns of neural activity represents a significant step in understanding how the brain translates complex signals from odorant receptor...

Computational Tool Predicts How Drugs Work In Cells, Advancing Efforts To Design Better Medicines

The ability to select and develop compounds that act on specific cellular targets has just gained a computational ally ?a mathematical algorithm that predicts the precise effects a given compound will have on a cell’s molecular components or chemical processes. Using this tool, drug developers can design compounds that will act on only desired gene and protein targets, eliciting therapeutic respo...

$6.5 Million Grant for Microarray Center at Yale School of Medicine

In 1909, while harvesting a typical corn crop (Zea mays) in Illinois, a field worker noticed a plant so unusual that it was initially believed to be a new species. Its "peculiarly shaped ear" was "laid aside as a curiosity" and the specimen was designated Zea ramosa (from the Latin ramosus, "having many branches"). Due to the alteration of a single gene, later named ramosa1, both the ear and the...

FDA approves child-friendly AIDS medicine

A new website with a Global Information System will provide valuable information for assessing environmental hazards caused by Hurricane Katrina. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), one of the National Institutes of Health, created the website to provide the most up-to-date data to public health and safety workers on contaminants in flood waters, infrastructure and in...

Compound from Chinese medicine shows promise in head and neck cancer

A compound derived from cottonseed could help improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy at treating head and neck cancer, researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have found. The findings, which appear in the July issue of the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, could lead to a treatment that provides an effective option to surgically removing the cancer, he...

Researcher at UGA College of Veterinary Medicine identifies new way of combating viral diseases

Four seemingly unrelated viral diseases may some day be defeated by a single treatment, according to a recent collaborative study involving researchers at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine. Their study focuses on viruses responsible for HIV, measles, Ebola and Marburg and includes investigators from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Centers for Disease C...

PLoS Medicine publishes first trial of effect of male circumcision on HIV infection

The peer-reviewed results of the first trial of the effect of male circumcision on HIV infection, which some experts call "a landmark trial," will be published in Because HIV infection rates are generally lower among African groups...

Making medicine 'smarter'

As much as patients would like for the word "doctor" to mean "all-knowing," unfortunately, this will never be the case. Human fallibility on the part of medical professionals sometimes leads to devastating misdiagnoses that can result in additional suffering, or even death, for their patients. But there is hope for better, more accurate medical diagnoses through the development of new tech...

Sensors, a smart dose of medicine for cancer treatment

The INVORAD project developed systems for real-time radiation monitoring for patient dosimetry in Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT). IMRT is a radiation therapy for cancers that improves clinical outcomes by more accurately targeting tumours and minimising the amount of radiation absorbed by healthy tissue. The result is that patients only receive a high radiation dose where they nee...

MIT chemist discovers secret behind nature's medicines

MIT scientists have just learned another lesson from nature. After years of wondering how organisms managed to create self-medications, such as anti-fungal agents, chemists have discovered the simple secret. Scientists already knew that a particular enzyme was able to coax a reaction out of stubborn chemical concoctions to generate a large family of medically valuable compounds called halo...

Traditional Chinese medicine for diabetes has scientific backing

Reports of a traditional Chinese medicine having beneficial effects for people suffering from type 2 diabetesnow has some scientific evidence to back up the claims. A collaboration between Chinese, Korean, andAustralian scientists at Sydney's Garvan Institute, has revealed that the natural plant product berberine could be a valuable new treatment. Berberine is found in the roots and bark...

Magnetism and mimicry of nature hold hope for better medicine, environmental safety

Critical advances in medicine and environmental protection promise to emerge from a new method for biochemical analysis of fluids developed by an international science team led in part by Arizona State University researchers. Called "digital magnetofluidics," it promises more rapid, more accurate and less costly analyses of water and biological fluids ?blood, urine, saliva ?that require o...

Smooth sailing: 'cruise ship virus' tackled by UH, Baylor College of Medicine

You're on vacation, having fun sailing the seven seas, when your stomach starts rolling worse than the waves. Before you know it, nausea and vomiting have replaced shuffle board and sun-bathing. Unfortunately, it's a scenario that's becoming increasingly common on cruise ships. So common, in fact, that the National Institutes of Health's Western Regional Center of Excellence (RCE) for...

Report focuses on the role good microbes play in future medicine

Not all bacteria are bad. In fact, beneficial microbes could represent the future of medicine, with the potential to treat a variety of diseases in humans and animals from diarrhea and eczema to gum disease and autoimmune disorders, according to a report released by the American Academy of Microbiology, Probiotic Microbes: The Scientific Basis. "Theoretically, beneficial microorganisms c...

Herbal medicine silymarin may help sugar-control in people with type II diabetes

Diabetes is a growing health problem. Giving antioxidants is recognised as one way of helping people with diabetes to control their blood sugar levels. The herbal medicine extracted from seeds of the Milk Thistle, Silybum marianum (silymarin) is known to have antioxidant properties and research published this week in Phytotherapy Research shows that this extract can help people significan...

Five new technologies that promise to transform medicine

Fat zapping to shed excess weight, miniature telescopes to restore vision, and smart nappies to detect common childhood infections: these are some of the new technologies that promise to transform medicine, according to this week's Christmas issue of the BMJ. The forecasts are made by Professor Donald Combs of the Eastern Virginia Medical School and are based on existing technologies that...

Protect patients from exploitation by alternative medicines industry

It is time to protect patients from “vile and cynical exploitation?by the alternative medicines industry, argues a cancer expert in this week’s BMJ. Yet the rat...

Telemedicine robots help improve health

University of Queensland telemedicine researchers are using a robot named Eliza to conquer the tyranny of distance and improve delivery of specialist medical care to the bush. The wireless robots can be wheeled to the bedside o...

Nanotechnology propels advances in regenerative medicine research

The study, which was directed by Scripps Research Professor Benjamin Cravatt, Ph.D., is being published in the September 8 issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The new study describes a pathway-different than the one previously suggested-for the biosynthesis of neurotransmitter lipids, N-acyl ethanolamines (NAEs), which include the endogenous cannabinoid ("endocannabinoid") ananda...

Faster, low cost sequencing technologies needed to drive era of personalized medicine

DNA testing is transforming health care and medicine, but current technologies only give a snapshot of an individual's genetic makeup. Any patient wanting a complete picture of their inherited DNA, or genome, would drop their jaw at the sight of the bill -- to the current tune of $10 million or more charged for every human or mammalian-sized genome sequenced. Now, with a grant award from t...

Stanford scientists make major breakthrough in regenerative medicine

Findings described in a new study by Stanford scientists may be the first step toward a major revolution in human regenerative medicine—a future where advanced organ damage can be repaired by the body itself. In the May 2007 issue of The FASEB Journal, researchers show that a human evolutionary ancestor, the sea squirt, can correct abnormalities over a series of generations, suggesting that a sim...

Health Canada approves cold and flu medicine

Health Canada, the Canadian government regulatory agency, has approved wide-ranging new health claims for COLD-fX®, the most popular cold/flu remedy in Canada. After an extensive review, the Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD) ?a division of Health Canada responsible for evaluating the safety, efficacy and quality of natural health products (NHPs) ?has issued COLD-fX with a much sought af...

Producing medicines in plant seeds

Using plants to produce useful proteins could be an inexpensive alternative to current medicine production methods. Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) at Ghent University have succeeded in producing in plant seeds proteins that have a very strong resemblance to antibodies. They have also demonstrated that these antibody variants are just as active as t...

Penn researchers show how nanocylinders deliver medicine better than nanospheres

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine & School of Engineering and Applied Science have discovered a better way to deliver drugs to tumors. By using a cylindrical-shaped carrier they were able sustain delivery of the anticancer drug paclitaxel to an animal model of lung cancer ten times longer than that delivered on spherical-shaped carriers. These findings have impl...

Egyptians, not Greeks were true fathers of medicine

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks. "Cla...

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers develop 'off-the-shelf' vascular grafts

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine investigators have engineered artificial blood vessels from muscle-derived stem cells (MDSCs) and a biodegradable polymer that exhibit extensive remodeling and remain free of blockages when grafted into rats. The results of their study, which is being presented at the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) North A...