When I learned this summer that the clinical trial of the cancer drug that seems to be keeping me alive had unexpectedly shut down, I discovered the murky rules governing drug trials and the stressful confusion they breed in participants. In August, Alesha, the research nurse who has overseen my care since I entered a…
The school year is still young, yet parents and students alike may have noticed that academic motivation is already low. No surprise there. Whether school is remote, in-person or hybrid, many students have come to feel that, if this year were a meal, it would be all vegetables and no dessert. Gone, or hamstrung by…
From the early days of the pandemic, Carly Cushnie was worried. “It’s at a point now where everyone is really freaking out,” Ms. Cushnie, a 36-year-old designer, told The New York Times this spring. “I’m definitely concerned about getting through it. I haven’t even thought about September.” Ms. Cushnie and her company made it through…
Immunotherapies, such as checkpoint inhibitor drugs, have made worlds of difference for the treatment of cancer. Most clinicians and scientists understand these drugs to act on what’s known as the adaptive immune system, the T cells and B cells that respond to specific threats to the body. New research from an international team co-led by…
Novel approach to measuring antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 Current antibody testing strategies are known for their lack of specificity, leading to a large proportion of false positive results. German researchers lead by Prof. Anette-G. Ziegler at Helmholtz Zentrum München developed a novel approach to measuring antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 by defining antibody positivity as a dual-positive response…
New Orleans, LA – A study conducted by Richard Vander Heide, MD, PhD, Professor and Director of Pathology Research at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, and Marc Halushka, MD, PhD, Professor of Pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, suggests myocarditis caused by COVID-19 may be a relatively rare occurrence. Their findings…
Researchers in the University of Georgia’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases have found that a more intensive, less frequent drug regimen with currently available therapeutics could cure the infection that causes Chagas disease, a potentially life-threatening illness affecting up to 300,000 people in the United States. Trypanosoma cruzi is a single-celled parasitic organism…
A new method for evaluating hearing has received a second patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Work leading to the patent, “Method for Determining Hearing Thresholds in the Absence of Pure-Tone Testing,” was conducted at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. The method is used in the NTID…
A Swansea University academic has helped draw up a landmark agreement amongst international experts, setting out the world’s first standard guidance on how people with diabetes can use modern glucose monitoring devices to help them exercise safely. The guidance will be a crucial resource for healthcare professionals around the world, so they can help people…
More than a dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers experienced large, repeated outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses in the last three years, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco. Between Jan. 1, 2017, and March 22, 2020, the researchers identified 1,280 cases of influenza, 1,052 cases of chickenpox, and…