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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,226

‘I’m just carrying on’: vaccine gives brain cancer patient years of extra life

It’s been seven years since Nigel French was woken up in the middle of the night by his wife after having a seizure, which came out of the blue after experiencing a mild headache – something he had simply put down to blocked sinuses.

“She told me that the ambulance had arrived and I was like: ‘what ambulance?’” recalls French, 53, a mechanic who was diagnosed with glioblastoma that required urgent surgery, without which he would have had only months to live.

In a different scenario, the impact of one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer would have taken its toll by now, but thanks to a revolutionary vaccine, he is not only still alive but continuing to work and enjoy all that life has to offer.

Lung infections caused by soil fungi are a problem nationwide, according to new study

Fungi in the soil cause a significant number of serious lung infections in 48 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, including many areas long thought to be free of deadly environmental fungi, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Studies from the 1950s and 60s indicated that fungal lung infections were a problem only in certain parts of the country. The new study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, shows that is no longer the case. Doctors who rely on outdated maps of disease-causing may miss the signs of a fungal lung infection, resulting in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, the researchers said.

“Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area—a different doctor every time—about a case they can’t solve,” said senior author Andrej Spec, MD, an associate professor of medicine and a specialist in . “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say, ‘You guys call me all the time about this. You do have histo.’”

Fentanyl ‘vaccine’ may have been discovered, researchers say

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a warning for parents after the discovery of fentanyl disguised as children’s chewable vitamins. LiveNOW from FOX’s Josh Breslow spoke with FOX 5 DC’s Bob Barnard about that warning.

The findings, published late last month in the journal Pharmaceutics, have been described as a potential game changer in addressing an epidemic that has claimed thousands of American lives.

New technique for studying liver cells within an organism could shed light on the genes required for regeneration

The liver’s ability to regenerate itself is legendary. Even if more than 70% of the organ is removed, the remaining tissue can regrow an entire new liver.

Kristin Knouse, an MIT assistant professor of biology, wants to find out how the liver is able to achieve this kind of regeneration, in hopes of learning how to induce other organs to do the same thing. To that end, her lab has developed a new way to perform genome-wide studies of the liver in mice, using the gene-editing system CRISPR.

With this new technique, researchers can study how each of the in the mouse genome affects a particular disease or behavior. In a paper describing the technique, the researchers uncovered several genes important for liver cell survival and proliferation that had not been seen before in studies of cells grown in a lab dish.

An on-chip time-lens generates ultrafast pulses

Femtosecond pulsed lasers—which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second—are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and time. Today, these lasers are typically expensive table-top systems, which limits their use in applications that have size and power consumption restrictions.

An on-chip femtosecond pulse source would unlock new applications in quantum and optical computing, astronomy, optical communications and beyond. However, it’s been a challenge to integrate tunable and highly efficient pulsed lasers onto chips.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a high-performance, on-chip femtosecond pulse source using a tool that seems straight out of science fiction: a time lens.

New FDA warning links cough medicine to rise in child poisonings

Parents and medical providers are being called on to be careful with prescription cough medication as overdoses among children are on the rise.

Calls to poison control centers in the United States reporting the ingestion of prescription cough medicine by children rose by 158% between 2010 and 2018, according to a study published Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that pediatric poisonings involving the drug benzonatate, sold under the brand name Tessalon, have increased each year.