Doctors are beginning to get answers to the question that every parent whose child has had a traumatic brain injury (TBI) wants to know: What will my child be like 10 years from now? In a study to be presented Friday Feb. 10 at the annual meeting of the Association of Academic Physiatrists in Las...
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How to quickly identify sepsis-causing bacteria – melt it down
Stephanie Fraley (left) reviews bacterial DNA melt curve data with her graduate students(Credit: UCSD) When a patient is diagnosed with sepsis, a medical syndrome that kills more people than breast cancer, prostate cancer and HIV combined, it sets off a countdown for doctors to treat the infection and uncover the culprit causing the body’s systems to shut down....
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Blood test may help differentiate Parkinson's from similar diseases
A simple blood test may be as accurate as a spinal fluid test when trying to determine whether symptoms are caused by Parkinson’s disease or another atypical parkinsonism disorder, according to a new study published in the February 8, 2017, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In early stages...
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The Principles of Engineering Immune Cells to Treat Cancer
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have proven that engineered immune cells can serve as a powerful new class of cancer therapeutics. Clinical experience has helped to define the major challenges that must be met to make engineered T cells a reliable, safe, and effective platform that can be deployed against a broad range of tumors. The...
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Poisoning the Devil
Our sight was caught by the subject line of an email we received on March 12, 2016: “American Society of Hematology (ASH) Ernest Beutler Lecture and Prize.” It came from Charles Abrams, President of the ASH Society, congratulating Zhu Chen for being the recipient of the 2016 Ernest Beutler Lecture and Prize together with our...
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Applications of Immunogenomics to Cancer
Cancer immunogenomics originally was framed by research supporting the hypothesis that cancer mutations generated novel peptides seen as “non-self” by the immune system. The search for these “neoantigens” has been facilitated by the combination of new sequencing technologies, specialized computational analyses, and HLA binding predictions that evaluate somatic alterations in a cancer genome and interpret...
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Primary, Adaptive, and Acquired Resistance to Cancer Immunotherapy
Introduction Metastatic cancers remain an incurable disease for the great majority of patients, as the intrinsic genomic instability common to all cancers facilitates the escape from cytotoxic or targeted therapies. The recent breakthroughs in the understanding of tumor immune biology and the development of newer generation of cancer immunotherapies have opened a brand new chapter...
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Ethicists advise caution in applying CRISPR gene editing to humans
An artist’s rendering of the powerful genome editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9. Ethicists have been working overtime to figure out how to handle CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technique that could potentially prevent congenital diseases but could also be used for cosmetic enhancements and lead to permanent, heritable changes in the human species. The latest iteration of this...
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Elon Musk: If Humans Are to Survive, We Must Merge With Machines
IN BRIEF Elon Musk thinks that, as AI technology and automation continue to replace jobs and more traditional technology, humans will become obsolete and need to merge with machines Since computers can communicate at speeds well beyond an organic organisms’ capacity, Musk thinks that creating a symbiotic relationship between us and our tech will give...
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One Country Has Eliminated HIV Transmission to Newborns
IN BRIEF Thailand has become the first Asian country to completely eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV Since HIV is still a global pandemic, it is important for other countries to take note of the enormous success that Thailand has found through government support of health guidelines MOTHER-TO-CHILD TRANSMISSION While the virus existed earlier,...