Stressed Out Interferons Reveal Potential Key to Alternative Lupus Treatment Iwona Buskiewicz, Ph.D., left, and colleagues, including Andreas Koenig, Ph.D., far right, in their lab in the Given building at the Larner College of Medicine at UVM. (Photo: Andy Duback) Only one new drug has become available over the past 50 years for the estimated...
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Newfound Effect of Cancer Drug May Expand its Use
NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A drug first designed to prevent cancer cells from multiplying has a second effect: it switches immune cells that turn down the body’s attack on tumors back into the kind that amplify it. This is the finding of a study led by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and published recently in Cancer Immunology...
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New guidelines outline how to handle back pain
If you have an achy back, you’ve got company. As many as 80 percent of adults will have back pain. Berta Axelrad, 76, has lived with chronic low back pain for most of her life. “The pain is just so, well, it’s terrible!” she said. She swears by exercise, yoga and walking. “It minimizes the...
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FDA approves Northbrook company's $89,000 muscular dystrophy drug
Liam McNicholas, 12, of Lindenhurst, talks with Meghan Kostyk, an advanced practice nurse, on Feb. 9, 2017, during his biannual visit to Lurie Children’s Hospital for a checkup. Liam has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a condition which is treated by a drug from a Northbrook company that just received FDA approval. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune)...
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Common weed could help fight deadly superbug, study finds
Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University, in her lab with berries from the Brazilian peppertree. The red berries of a weed found in the southern United States contain an compound that can disarm a deadly superbug, according to research published Friday. Researchers from Emory University and the University of Iowa found that extracts...
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Could depression be treated with Botox?
In the largest randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled study to date on the effect of OnabotulinumtoxinA (as known as Botox) on depression, researchers found that more than half of subjects suffering from moderate to severe depression showed a substantial improvement (greater than or equal to 50% of baseline) in their depressive symptoms as measured by the...
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Prion Test For Rare, Fatal Brain Disease Helps Families Cope
Keith Negley for NPR By the time Kay Schwister got her diagnosis last summer, she couldn’t talk anymore. But she could still scowl, and scowl she did. After weeks of decline and no clue what was causing it, doctors had told Schwister — a 53-year-old vocational rehab counselor and mother of two from Chicago —...
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First blood biomarker for multiple sclerosis discovered
A blood test for determining the subtype of MS could be as little as two years away following the discovery of a blood biomarker Although there is no known cure for multiple sclerosis (MS), there are treatments that can help prevent new attacks and improve function after an attack. However, there are three subtypes of...
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Researchers chart global genetic interaction networks in human cancer cells
Using genome-wide CRISPR screens, Wang et al. identified clusters of genes that act together to carry diverse sets of biological processes that support cell survival and proliferation Cancer is a heterogeneous disease, with myriad distinct subtypes that differ in their genetic roots. As a result, cancers rely on varied pathways for survival — and respond...
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Scientists identify two brain networks influencing how we make decisions
Scientists at the Medical Research Council Brain Network Dynamics Unit at the University of Oxford have pinpointed two distinct mechanisms in the human brain that control the balance between speed and accuracy when making decisions. Their discovery, published in eLife, sheds new light on the networks that determine how quickly we choose an option, and how...