Feature Channels: Personalized Medicine

• share
• favorite_border

- The rapidly emerging field of precision medicine is a “disruptive innovation” that offers the possibility of remarkably fine-tuned remedies to improve patient health while minimizing the risk of harmful side effects, says J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System, in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: genetics and cancer, diabetes and blindness, nanotech, engineering, personalized medicine, energy, and e-cigarettes.

• share
• favorite_border

Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: gun regulation, psychology and altruism, big data, threats to coral reefs, extra-terrestrial life, personalized diets, metabolic syndrome and heart health, new drug target to treat arthritis, and archeologists find oldest tools.

• share
• favorite_border

The latest interview series from FutureFood 2050 highlights innovative new research that will shape healthy eating guidelines in the next few decades.

• share
• favorite_border

Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: Statin drugs and cancer, concussions, women in business, tracking ebola, precision medicine, nursing, Nepal earthquake, and Oak Ridge National Lab researchers working on LHC experiments.

• share
• favorite_border

Manchester doctors have helped show that high-risk womb cancer patients can be genetically profiled to allow them to receive more appropriate treatment.

• share
• favorite_border

Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: Bruce Jenner and transgender health, agriculture and pesticide alternatives, new tick-borne disease, internal dissent in Iran over nuclear deal, listeria ice cream recalls, changing mammography recommendations, immunology, materials science, and healthcare education.

• share
• favorite_border

In a first step towards realizing the future of personalized pediatric medicine, Rady Children’s Hospital–San Diego has begun whole genome sequencing of San Diego County children born with birth defects of unknown cause.

• share
• favorite_border

Penn translational med pioneer advocates that to “influence emergence of the clinic of the future, one designed to practice precision medicine,” an NIH plan to establish large-scale collaborative clinical trials needs also to pay better attention to three areas of emerging practice: adaptive clinical trials, merging EMRs and biobanks, and human phenotyping.

• share
• favorite_border

Genetically modified versions of patients’ own immune cells successfully traveled to tumors they were designed to attack in an early-stage trial for mesothelioma and pancreatic and ovarian cancers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The data adds to a growing body of research showing the promise of CAR T cell technology. The interim results will be presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2015, April 18-22.

• share
• favorite_border

Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: nanotech treating cancer, immunology, autism, patient monitoring, research ethics, lingering effects of dispersant in Gulf of Mexico, wildlife conservation.

• share
• favorite_border

Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey is joining forces with Meridian Health in offering patients with rare forms of cancer or with cancer that no longer responds to standard treatment access to a clinical trial. The research will use genomic analysis to identify abnormal changes in the genetic make-up of the cancer. The clinical trial is part of the ‘precision medicine’ initiative at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, which aims to tailor or ‘personalize’ cancer treatment for patients.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center have built a new computational tool that identifies 800 different ways people are at increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), permitting for the first time a personalized prediction guide.

• share
• favorite_border

Websites that market personalized cancer care services often overemphasize their purported benefits and downplay their limitations, and many sites offer genetic tests whose value for guiding cancer treatment has not been shown to be clinically useful, according to a new study from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have just released a “precision medicine” approach to diabetes prevention that could keep more people from joining the ranks of the 29 million Americans with diabetes – using existing information like blood sugar levels and waist-to-hip ratios, and without needing new genetic tests.

• share
• favorite_border

Immune cells engineered to seek out and attack a type of deadly brain cancer were found to be both safe and effective at controlling tumor growth in mice that were treated with these modified cells. The results paved the way for a newly opened clinical trial for glioblastoma patients at Penn.

• share
• favorite_border

While diet and exercise are important, new findings sharpen the role genetics play in people’s tendency to gain weight and where the fat is stored. This work is the first step toward finding individual genes that play key roles in body shape and size.

• share
• favorite_border

People’s perceptions of the cost of a drug may affect how much they benefit from the drug, even when they are receiving only a placebo, according to a new study of people with Parkinson’s disease published in the January 28, 2015 online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

• share
• favorite_border

With President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech addressing the launch of a national precision medicine initiative to further tackle cancer and other diseases, Howard L. Kaufman, MD, FACS, a leading immunotherapy expert from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, weighs in on where we stand with precision immunology and personalized medicine and what needs to be accomplished.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

“Precision medicine” is becoming a national catchphrase after President Obama highlighted it in his State of the Union address. But what exactly is it? Richard Weinshilboum, M.D., acting director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, describes this new, rapidly advancing frontier in medicine and outlines 10 changes that would speed development and help more patients benefit from a personalized approach to health care:

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have produced an approach that completely protects animal models against a type of genetic disruption that causes intellectual disability, including serious memory impairments and altered anxiety levels.

• share
• favorite_border

Innovative scoring system uses “Ann Arbor GVHD score” to better predict how patients will respond, minimize side effects

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists from Roswell Park Cancer Institute have reported new mechanisms of action of the novel anticancer agent FL118 and new potential therapeutic targets for the agent, a camptothecin analogue.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have devised a way to replace the knee’s protective lining, called the meniscus, using a personalized 3D-printed implant, or scaffold, infused with human growth factors that prompt the body to regenerate the lining on its own. The therapy, successfully tested in sheep, could provide the first effective and long-lasting repair of damaged menisci, which occur in millions of Americans each year and can lead to debilitating arthritis. The paper was published today in the online edition of Science Translational Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

New research technique could allow better, more personalized cancer drug treatments

• share
• favorite_border

Using CRISPR, researchers at MIT's Koch Institute have developed a new approach to rapidly model the effects of tumor cells’ genetic mutations in mice.

• share
• favorite_border

Ninety percent of children and adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who had relapsed multiple times or failed to respond to standard therapies went into remission after receiving an investigational personalized cellular therapy, CTL019, developed at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The results are published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a new fusion protein found in approximately 15 percent of secondary glioblastomas or brain tumors. The finding offers new insights into the cause of this cancer and provides a therapeutic target for personalized oncologic care.

• share
• favorite_border

Stem cell biologists have reprogrammed skin cells from patients with a rare genetic disorder, called familial dysautonomia, into neural crest cells that mimic and display many biological features of the disease. The research expedites the creation of these precursor cells from any patient with a neural crest-related disorder, allowing scientists to study each patient’s disorder at the cellular level.

• share
• favorite_border

A method of growing human cells from tissue removed from a patient’s gastrointestinal (GI) tract eventually may help scientists develop tailor-made therapies for inflammatory bowel disease and other GI conditions. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have made cell lines from individual patients in as little as two weeks. They said the cell lines can help them understand the underlying problems in the GI tracts of individual patients and be used to test new treatments.

• share
• favorite_border

Adoption of hourly rounds schedules for nurses working in acute care hospitals may improve patient safety and overall satisfaction with care provided, according to research reported in the Journal for Healthcare Quality, the peer reviewed publication of the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ, www.nahq.org).

• share
• favorite_border

The new Transitions of Care initiative spearheaded by the Endocrine Society provides interactive toolkits to help young adults who have hormone conditions navigate the shift from a pediatric to an adult health care team. The Society partnered with several health care organizations on the initiative, which offers resources for young adults, their parents and health care providers.

• share
• favorite_border

Like other major research centers studying genetic causes of uncommon and poorly understood nervous system disorders, Cedars-Sinai maintains a growing collection of DNA and tissue samples donated by patients. What sets Cedars-Sinai’s Repository of Neurologic and Neuromuscular Disorders apart is its special emphasis on tissue collection – part of its focus on creating future individualized treatments for patients.

• share
• favorite_border

Telemedicine is an effective strategy to screen for the potentially blinding disease known as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), according to a study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI). The investigators say that the approach, if adopted broadly, could help ease the strain on hospitals with limited access to ophthalmologists and lead to better care for infants in underserved areas of the country. NEI is a part of the National Institutes of Health.

• share
• favorite_border

A Mayo Clinic-led group of researchers has discovered three subgroups of a single type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that have markedly different survival rates. These subgroups could not be differentiated by routine pathology but only with the aid of novel genetic tests, which the research team recommends giving to all patients with ALK-negative anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (ALCL). Findings are published in the journal Blood.

• share
• favorite_border

Virginia Bioinformatics Institute researchers at Virginia Tech have discovered aging can occur at different rates within an individual's genome, with some portions aging 100 times faster than others. It makes personalized medicine even more challenging.

• share
• favorite_border

Advances in the understanding of the genetics of coronary artery disease, or CAD, will revitalize the field and lead to more therapeutic targets for new medicines to combat this common disease, suggests a genetics expert from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in a Perspective article in the new issue of Science Translational Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

UAB is launching a new clinical effort — the first of its type in the US — to prepare a personalized dementia risk assessment for people concerned about their risk for developing memory problems as they age.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at the UAB School of Medicine have created an experimental blood test that, for the first time, determines a Bioenergetic Health Index, by gauging the performance of mitochondria, the cell’s energy powerhouses.

• share
• favorite_border

Mice severely disabled by a condition similar to multiple sclerosis (MS) were able to walk less than two weeks following treatment with human neural stem cells. The finding, which uncovers potential new avenues for treating MS, will be published online on May 15, 2014, in the journal Stem Cell Reports.

• share
• favorite_border

Biogeographical data is useful in screening for disease risk and drug sensitivity associated with certain ethnic groups. A team of researchers, including an investigator from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has developed a tool to accurately identify the biogeography of worldwide individuals.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists have created the first example of living human cartilage grown on a laboratory chip. The researchers ultimately aim to use their innovative 3-D printing approach to create replacement cartilage for patients with osteoarthritis or soldiers with battlefield injuries.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

It has been 1.5 years since Mayo Clinic opened the world’s first integrated multidisciplinary genomics service, the Individualized Medicine Clinic, which uses genomics and next-generation sequencing technologies to personalize treatments for patients with advanced cancer and complex diagnoses. In a special issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C, “Implementation of Genomic Medicine,” developers of the Individualized Medicine Clinic report the clinic’s structure and share lessons learned in everything from efficacy of genomics in patient care to struggles with insurance reimbursement and ethical dilemmas.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at the Center for Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology at Harvard School of Public Health have discovered a way to measure the effective density of engineered nanoparticles in physiological fluids, making it possible to determine the amount of nanomaterials that come into contact with cells and tissue in culture.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have devised a new system for classifying periodontal disease based on the genetic signature of affected tissue, rather than on clinical signs and symptoms. The new classification system, the first of its kind, may allow for earlier detection and more individualized treatment of severe periodontitis, before loss of teeth and supportive bone occurs. The findings were published recently in the online edition of the Journal of Dental Research.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health, Emory University and Cedars-Sinai – specialists in identifying and treating very rare diseases – used three innovative tools to detect a previously unknown gene mutation, test potential therapies in the lab, and initiate personalized drug treatment for a boy with a lifelong history of uncontrollable seizures that caused significant impact on his cognitive and social development.

• share
• favorite_border

Stars, diamonds, circles. Rather than your average bowl of Lucky Charms, these are three-dimensional cell cultures generated by an exciting new digital microfluidics platform, the results of which have been published in Nature Communications

• share
• favorite_border

A new study found evidence that assessing the route to cancer on a case-by-case basis might make more sense than basing a patient’s cancer treatment on commonly disrupted genes and pathways.