AUGUSTA, Ga. (Feb. 14, 2017) – Constant infusion of a drug now used intermittently to “rescue” patients with Parkinson’s from bouts of immobility may also help avoid these debilitating symptoms and smooth out their movement throughout the day, physician-scientists say. “As presently used, this therapy helps bridge a gap,” said Dr. Kapil D. Sethi, neurologist...
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New Integrase Inhibitor Matches Existing HIV Tx
SEATTLE — The investigational integrase inhibitor bictegravir worked as well as dolutegravir (Tivicay) and caused no serious side effects when used as part of a three-drug antiretroviral therapy regimen, a researcher said here. Bictegravir is now being evaluated in phase III studies. Viral suppression rates were high in both treatment arms and no one taking...
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Poor thigh muscle strength may increase women's risk of knee osteoarthritis
A new study has found that poor strength in the thigh muscles may increase the risk of knee osteoarthritis in women but not men. This relationship was confounded by body mass index (BMI), which itself is known as a risk factor for knee osteoarthritis. The study’s investigators noted that there may be more contractile tissue...
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Studies uncover long-term effects of traumatic brain injury
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...