BreakThrough Digest Medical News

Recent Posts

• Scientists Developing Breast Cancer ‘Vaccine’
• New genetic markers for ulcerative colitis identified, researchers report in Nature Genetics
• Scientists Identify New Congenital Neutropenia Syndrome and Causative Gene Mutation
• Molecular imaging enables earlier, individualized treatment of thyroid cancer
• Antioxidants offer pain relief in patients with chronic pancreatitis
• Toxicity mechanism identified for Parkinson’s disease
• Researchers engineer pancreatic cell transplants to evade immune response
• bismuth appears safe for the treatment peptic ulcer disease

Scientists Developing Breast Cancer ‘Vaccine’

Scientists at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hope to begin clinical trials this spring on a vaccine to prevent the recurrence of breast cancer.

If successful, the vaccine would not replace traditional treatment such as chemotherapy and radiation but could be an additional treatment for patients, said Laura Hutchins, the principal investigator, professor of internal medicine, and director of the division of hematology and oncology.

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New genetic markers for ulcerative colitis identified, researchers report in Nature Genetics

Discovery could improve understanding of disease process, lead to new therapies

An international team led by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers has identified genetic markers associated with risk for ulcerative colitis. The findings, which appear today as an advance online publication of the journal Nature Genetics, bring researchers closer to understanding the biological pathways involved in the disease and may lead to the development of new treatments that specifically target them.

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Scientists Identify New Congenital Neutropenia Syndrome and Causative Gene Mutation

A team of scientists has discovered a new syndrome associated with severe congenital neutropenia (SCN), a rare disorder in which children lack sufficient infection-fighting white cells, and identified the genetic cause of the syndrome: mutations in the gene Glucose-6-phosphatase, catalytic subunit 3 (G6PC3). The findings, which are published in the Jan. 1, 2009 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, were made by an international team of scientists, composed of 14 researchers from the Medical School of Hannover in Germany and12 from other research institutions, including the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

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Molecular imaging enables earlier, individualized treatment of thyroid cancer

Physicians now able to accurately distinguish cancerous lymph nodes from healthy tissue in cancer patients, according to article in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine

In a study to determine the diagnostic value of molecular imaging in nodal staging of patients with thyroid cancer, researchers were able for the first time to accurately distinguish between cancerous cells in regional lymph nodes and normal residual thyroid tissue directly after surgery.

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Antioxidants offer pain relief in patients with chronic pancreatitis

Convincing evidence to recommend antioxidants for treatment has been lacking

Antioxidant supplementation was found to be effective in relieving pain and reducing levels of oxidative stress in patients with chronic pancreatitis (CP), reports a new study in Gastroenterology. CP is a progressive inflammatory disease of the pancreas in which patients experience abdominal pain (in early stage) and diabetes and maldigestion (in late stage). Pain is the major problem in 90 percent of patients with CP and currently, there is no effective medical therapy for pain relief. Gastroenterology is the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

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Toxicity mechanism identified for Parkinson’s disease

Neurologists have observed for decades that Lewy bodies, clumps of aggregated proteins inside cells, appear in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The presence of Lewy bodies suggests underlying problems in protein recycling and waste disposal, leading to the puzzle: how does disrupting those processes kill brain cells?

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