Body

A team led by University of Arizona researchers is taking a new, patient-directed approach to treating pancreatic cancer. Rather than relying on conventional cell lines that have defined effective drug targets for other types of cancers, they are creating and sequencing cell lines from a cancer patient's own tissue. Their results, outlined August 4 in Cell Reports, reveal that pancreatic tumors are more varied than previously thought and that drug sensitivity is unique to each patient.

All's not fair in love and glucose intolerance - overweight men are more prone to get type 2 diabetes than are overweight women. The same phenomena holds true in mice and no one know why. Researchers at the Buck Institute provided a possible answer to that question by discovering that a protein involved in nutrient sensing and metabolism gets inhibited in male - but not female - mice fed a high fat diet.

Bottom Line: Renal cell carcinomas positive for the protein PD-L1 from patients who did not respond to treatment with the anti-PD-1 therapeutic nivolumab (Opdivo) had significantly higher expression of genes associated with metabolism, compared with PD-L1-positive tumors from patients who did respond to nivolumab.

Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Immunology Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

MADISON -- Mitochondria are the engines that drive cellular life, but these complex machines are vulnerable to a wide range of breakdowns, and hundreds of their component parts remain a functional mystery.

Cancer researchers have applied a comprehensive set of analytical tools to lethal cases of metastatic prostate cancer, yielding a detailed map of the complex networks of interactions among genes and proteins that enable prostate cancer cells to proliferate and evade treatment. The team also developed a computational approach for analyzing patient-specific data to help doctors choose the most effective drugs for individual patients.

A newly-named fossil whale species had superior high-frequency hearing ability, helped in part by the unique shape of inner ear features that have given scientists new clues about the evolution of this specialized sense.

Lake Nona, Fla., August 4, 2016 -- Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have made a major advance in understanding how the cells of an organism, which all contain the same genetic information, come to be so diverse. A study published today in Molecular Cell shows that a protein called OCT4 narrows down the range of cell types that stem cells can become.

Boston, MA-- In a retrospective study analyzing patients' medical records, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital found that patients' race significantly affected their longevity by increasing the likelihood of death after receiving androgen deprivation therapy (ADT). ADT was used to reduce the size of the prostate to make a patient eligible for prostate brachytherapy. These findings are published in the August 4, 2016 issue of Cancer.

New research from University College London, Moorfields Eye Hospital and Duke University School of Medicine has identified a gene that drives scarring, together with a rapidly translatable therapy, for the UK's most common cause of blinding conjunctivitis. The results demonstrate that the drug disulfiram, licensed for the control of alcohol abuse, normalises human and mouse scar making cell (fibroblast) functions and inhibits mouse ocular mucosal (conjunctival) scarring.

Most respondents across all ethnic and racial groups surveyed described loss of eyesight as the worst ailment that could happen to them when ranked against other conditions including loss of limb, memory, hearing, or speech, and indicated high support for ongoing research for vision and eye health, according to a study published online by JAMA Ophthalmology.

In a study published online by JAMA Ophthalmology, Paul D. Loprinzi, Ph.D., of the University of Mississippi, University, Miss., evaluated the association of sedentary behavior (SB) with diabetic retinopathy (DR) using data from the 2005 to 2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Recent legislation is encouraging clinical trials in children, including the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act and the Pediatric Research Equity Act. Yet clinical trials in children commonly go either uncompleted or unpublished, finds a comprehensive study conducted by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital. Results were published online August 4 by the journal Pediatrics.

Raising maggots may not sound glamorous, but that doesn't mean it's not important. In the latest issue of the Journal of Insect Science, Paola Lahuatte, a junior researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation, and her colleagues reveal how they used chicken blood to rear the larvae of the parasitic fly Philornis downsi in the lab. This protocol may be the first to effectively rear an avian blood-feeding fly from egg to adult in the absence of its host.

Tissue injury, such as occurs in response to a lack of oxygen, promotes an influx of immune cells to the site of damage. After an ischemic injury to the heart, such as occurs after a heart attack or heart transplant, these responses are often maladaptive, resulting in decreased contractility and possible failure. Innate immune cells called neutrophils infiltrate the heart and are linked to pathogenic responses following an ischemic event; however, it is not clear how these cells are recruited to the site of damage.

Oral and genital herpes are caused by the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and the herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which both cause lifelong infection. HSV-2 infection is associated with increased risk for HIV infection. HSV2-infected women pose a risk of transmitting this dangerous infection to newborn babies; therefore, avoiding herpes infection during pregnancy is very important. In this issue of JCI Insight, researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine report a promising vaccine strategy for immunizing against both HSV-1 and HSV-2 infections.