Skin accounts for around 15% of our body mass. It is the largest and most visible organ in the human body.
Yet many of the skin’s functions are often overlooked. It’s a sunscreen, a shield from germs, a reservoir of vitamin D and a means of tightly regulating our body temperature.
It took a global pandemic, but the critical role of messenger RNA in all of life’s functions has taken center stage in the past year with the successful rollout of mRNA vaccines to combat the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
In two new papers published the week of Jan. 17, the lab of Yale’s Wendy Gilbert sheds light on how mRNAs are born and how they regulate production of proteins inside of our cells once they reach maturity. The findings have implications not only for achieving effective doses for new vaccines, but for helping determine the biological roots of many cancers and diseases.
A chewing gum laced with a plant-grown protein serves as a “trap” for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, reducing viral load in saliva and potentially tamping down transmission, according to a new study.
New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that radiation therapy can reprogram heart muscle cells to what appears to be a younger state, fixing electrical problems that cause a life-threatening arrhythmia without the need for a long-used, invasive procedure.
Sarbecoviruses have crossed into humans twice in the last decade, leading to the deadly SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-04 and the current COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A new study, published today, shows that the most recent common ancestor of these viruses existed more than 21,000 years ago, nearly 30 times older than previous estimates.
Mammalian sperm cannot fertilize an egg from the get-go. It’s an ability acquired only after insemination, during passage through the female reproductive tract, and requires two consecutive, time-sensitive processes to provide sperm with the physical and biochemical traits necessary to complete their fundamental job.
If heart attacks blared a warning signal, patients would have a better chance of avoiding them. That’s the idea behind a new imaging technique developed by a Spartan-led team of researchers.
“We shine light into an artery where we’ve delivered certain types of particles that can absorb that light,” said Bryan Smith, an associate professor in Michigan State University’s College of Engineering. “As a product of the release of that energy, they can literally shout back at us in ways that we can detect and use to create 3D images.”
DALLAS, July 26, 2021 -- People who are just beginning treatment for high blood pressure can benefit equally from two different classes of medicine - angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) - yet ARBs may be less likely to cause medication side effects, according to an analysis of real-world data published today in Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal.
As opioid overdose deaths rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, people seeking treatment for opioid addiction had to wait nearly twice as long to begin methadone treatment in the United States than in Canada, a new Yale study has shown.
In both countries during the pandemic, about one in 10 methadone clinics were not accepting new patients and a third of those cited COVID-19 as the reason, according to research published July 23 in the journal JAMA Network Open.
An estimated 90,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses last year.
A research team led by Dr Rosario Delgado from the UAB Department of Mathematics, in collaboration with the Hospital de Mataró, developed a new machine learning-based model that predicts the risk of mortality of intensive care unit patients according to their characteristics. The research was published in the latest edition of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, with a special mention as a "Position paper".
MUSC Hollings Cancer Center was one of 28 clinical sites around the world that participated in the LOTIS-2 trial to test the efficacy of Loncastuximab tesirine, a promising new treatment for aggressive B-cell lymphoma. The results of the single-arm, phase 2 trial were published online in May 2021 in Lancet Oncology.
Brian Hess, M.D., a Hollings researcher and lymphoma specialist at MUSC Health, was instrumental in bringing the phase 2 trial to Hollings. The manufacturer of Loncastuximab tesirine, ADC Therapeutics S.A., sponsored the trial.
A study by researchers at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health shows that inexpensive and convenient devices such as silicone wristbands can be used to yield quantitative air quality data, which is particularly appealing for periods of susceptibility such as pregnancy.
The first clinical trial of a new dietary treatment for children and adults with severe forms of epilepsy, co-developed by UCL researchers and based on the ketogenic diet, has been successfully completed.
For the study, published in Brain Communications, clinicians evaluated the use of K.Vita®, (also known as Betashot), an oral liquid dietary supplement developed by UCL in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London, and Vitaflo International Ltd.
Gene therapy in mouse models showed promise in preventing vision loss or blindness from serious retinal injury including optic nerve damage, and from retinal disease including diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, Mount Sinai researchers report. Their study, published in the July 22 online publication of Cell, could transform treatment for those at risk of major vision loss from retinal degenerative diseases, which currently have no cure.