COVID-19 Tip Sheet: Story Ideas from Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins MedicineVaccine expert working on developing covid-19 vaccine, sees major differences between Covid-19 and SARS
Vaccine expert working on developing covid-19 vaccine, sees major differences between Covid-19 and SARS
In a study involving thousands of participants, a new blood test detected more than 50 types of cancer as well as their location within the body with a high degree of accuracy, according to an international team of researchers led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic.
Houston Methodist received FDA approval Saturday to become the first academic medical center in the nation to transfuse donated plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient into a critically ill patient. This treatment was fast-tracked to the bedside over the weekend as the death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic soared to more than 2,000 people across the United States, with more than 100,000 Americans sick from the virus.
• Two studies examine potential benefits of blood pressure monitoring outside of doctors’ offices for patients with kidney disease.
An expert team of researchers and clinicians have been working together to design, validate, and implement an “end-to-end” clinical pathology laboratory solution that will allow for the testing of approximately several hundred people per day in order to rapidly diagnose and help guide the selection of treatment and monitor disease course.
Penn Medicine research shows genetically engineering macrophages – an immune cell that eats invaders in the body – could be the key to unlocking cellular therapies that effectively target solid tumors
Children with aggressive blood cancers have differences — not just in the DNA code of their blood cells — but also in the heavily twisted protein superstructure that controls access to genes.
Engineers have created a tiny device that can rapidly detect harmful bacteria in blood, allowing health care professionals to pinpoint the cause of potentially deadly infections and fight them with drugs. The Rutgers coauthored study, led by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, is published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
• Study results call into question the utility of testing blood pressure load—the proportion of elevated blood pressure readings detected over 24 hours—for diagnosing hypertension in children.
The researchers have already confirmed their discovery in human tissue samples and used it to reverse high blood pressure in lab mice.
New research into why some people’s blood doesn’t clot well identified defects in the platelet-making process, where mutant cells aren’t behaving properly. Because these cells have a variety of different direction and movement issues, patients will need personalized drug therapies and treatments to treat patient-specific mutations.
Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have created a computer program for scientists at no charge that lets users readily quantify the structural and functional changes in the blood flow networks feeding tumors.
Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel treatment for sepsis – one of the leading causes of hospital death – that enhances the body’s bacteria-capturing neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) so that they more effectively capture infectious bacteria, resist degradation, and improve sepsis outcomes and survival.
Researchers have found that genetically defined subpopulations of leukemia cells present at diagnosis have distinct characteristics that lead to relapse.
Mount Sinai researchers have discovered a way to enhance the potency of blood-forming stem cells, potentially opening the door to a new approach for bone marrow transplantation.
New research shows brain imaging may be able to predict when a blood test known as a liquid biopsy would or would not produce clinically actionable information
A new program launched by the Department of Defense could be the answer to blood shortages on the battlefield, other remote locations, and in hospitals. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences' 4D Bio3 On-Demand Blood Program, or 4D Bio3 Blood, has developed highly efficient protocols and technology to generate red blood cells from stem cells. A key part of this technology is large-scale cell expansion at low cost, producing sufficient red blood cells for treatment in trauma care. This technology is also being adapted to create neutrophils, ultimately allowing for whole blood transfusion using these methods in the future.
The National Institutes of Health has launched a $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge (TAC) to spur the design and development of non-invasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact. The Challenge is focused on sickle cell disease, malaria and anemia and is led by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with higher measures of tumor mutations that show up in a blood test generally have a better clinical response to PD-1-based immunotherapy treatments than patients with a lower measure of mutations.
Harvard researchers have discovered a new mechanism for how the brain and its arteries communicate to supply blood to areas of heightened neural activity. The findings enable new avenues of study into the role of this process in neurological diseases.
Sepsis causes nearly 270,000 deaths in the United States each year. Find out how big data approaches are helping clinicians catch it sooner, treat it better, and help survivors cope with long-term effects.
University of Kentucky professor Ann Stowe’s research may pave the way to understanding and improving how the brain recovers from stroke.
The old story of a farmer trying to get a stubborn mule to pull a wagon by dangling a carrot in front of its nose, or hitting its rump with a stick, may not seem to have much to do with the practice of medicine. But a new study suggests that when it comes to making the best use of health care dollars, it will take a combination of carrots and sticks to move things forward.
Louise D. McCullough, MD, PhD, a physician-scientist at UTHealth is a recipient of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) prestigious $1 million Merit Award to investigate whether the maternal microbiome influences stroke risk in offspring.
Genes are like instructions, but with options for building more than one thing. Daniel Larson, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, studies this gene “splicing” process, which happens in normal cells and goes awry in blood cancers like leukemia.
Yvonne Chen engineers immune cells to target their most evasive enemy: cancer. New cancer immunotherapies generate immune cells that are effective killers of blood cancers, but they have a hard time with solid tumors.
Like finding a needle in a haystack, Liviu Movileanu can find a single molecule in blood.
Consumption of cocoa may improve walking performance for patients with peripheral artery disease, according to the results of a small, preliminary, phase II research trial published today in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation Research.
A novel research study by UC San Diego researchers will determine whether testing stored blood drops, recorded at birth, for 1,000 different molecules and chemicals can help predict autism risk years before symptoms would likely appear.
Researchers have discovered that endothelial cells have unique genetic signatures based on their location in the body.
The CDI team’s findings could ultimately improve cancer treatments for people of advanced age, like that of adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML)
It can be the bain of brain drug developers: The interface between the human brain and the bloodstream, the blood-brain-barrier, is so meticulous that animal models often fail to represent it. This improved chip represents important features more accurately.
Scientists have identified a key molecule involved in the development of cerebral malaria, a deadly form of the tropical disease. Further, they defined a potential drug target and way forward in alleviating this condition for which few targeted treatments are available.
In research published today in the journal Nature Communications, Utah-based scientists describe a novel way to treat cancers using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy. Laboratory tests using mouse models and tumor cells from patients displayed promising results for this novel cellular immunotherapy for multiple myeloma and other types of blood cancer.
An anti-cancer compound developed at the University of Michigan has shown “profound” activity in mouse models against two subtypes of leukemia — representing up to 40% of patients — a U-M research team reports in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
In the future, robots could take blood samples, benefiting patients and healthcare workers alike. A Rutgers-led team has created a blood-sampling robot that performed as well or better than people, according to the first human clinical trial of an automated blood drawing and testing device.
According to results from a Phase I/IIa trial at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, treatment with cord blood-derived chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK)-cell therapy targeting CD19 resulted in clinical responses in a majority of patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), with no major toxicities observed.
Researchers at Michigan State University’s Precision Health Program have helped develop a fascinating new method called magnetic levitation for detecting the density of proteins in the blood that could vastly improve the rate at which diseases are detected and diagnosed.
Surgeons at UT Southwestern have developed a process to determine the best approach for single breast reconstruction.
A UCLA-led study has found that levels of six proteins in the blood can be used to gauge a person’s risk for cerebral small vessel disease, or CSVD, a brain disease that affects an estimated 11 million older adults in the U.S.
NYU Langone hematologist-oncologist Dr. Rami K. Daya is leading renowned cancer experts at Perlmutter Cancer Center’s new Sunset Park location.
Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (GCSF) is currently used to treat neutropenia due to chemotherapy and has been successfully used for patients who require bone marrow transplants. The study is the first to report on the neuroprotective effect of GCSF in vivo and showed that it improved neurological deficits that occur in the first few days following cerebral ischemia. GCSF improved long-term behavioral outcomes while also stimulating a neural progenitor recovery response in a mouse model.
UCLA researchers are part of an international team that reported the use of a stem cell gene therapy to treat nine people with the rare, inherited blood disease known as X-linked chronic granulomatous disease, or X-CGD. Six of those patients are now in remission and have stopped other treatments. Before now, people with X-CGD – which causes recurrent infections, prolonged hospitalizations for treatment, and a shortened lifespan – had to rely on bone marrow donations for a chance at remission.
In the human body, cells shield themselves from disease-causing microbes by scrambling their lipids into liquids, according to new research.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, working with colleagues in the Netherlands, developed a blood test that can predict recurrence of gastric cancer in patients after surgery. A description of their test, which is still experimental, was published online Jan. 27 in the journal Nature Communications.
Evaluating the effectiveness of therapies for neurodegenerative diseases is often difficult because each patient’s progression is different. A new study shows artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of blood samples can predict and explain disease progression, which could one day help doctors choose more appropriate and effective treatments for patients.
Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found that orthostatic hypotension was not associated with higher risk of cardiovascular events, falls, or fainting among participants in The Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial. In a study published in the journal Hypertension, the scientists showed that hypertension treatment had no impact on the link between OH and cardiovascular outcomes or other adverse events.
A new study led by physician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) reports that the antihypertensive drug amlodipine lowered long-term gout risk compared to two other drugs commonly prescribed to lower blood pressure. The findings are published in the Journal of Hypertension.