January 9, 2015
(Medscape) – Four noted healthcare thought leaders mustered their most compelling arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide in a lively debate that was held in New York City and sponsored by Intelligence Squared US. Is physician-assisted suicide a positive development, … Read More
January 8, 2015
(New York Times) – Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, recently published a study in JAMA Psychiatry that identified a potential biomarker in the brain that could predict whether a depressed patient would respond better to … Read More
January 8, 2015
(New York Times) – An expert panel unanimously recommended on Wednesday that the Food and Drug Administration approve a cheaper copy of a special drug used in cancer therapy, paving the way for alternatives to an entire class of complex … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Vox) – The story is a deep dive into data about what pharmaceutical companies spend on marketing their new products. What it shows is that drug makers devote the largest share of their spending doctor interactions (things like meals and … Read More
January 8, 2015
(New Scientist) – The highest-profile person to receive an experimental Ebola drug is currently the British nurse Pauline Cafferkey. She is also being treated with plasma from a former Ebola patient. But she is by no means alone. Trials of … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Wired) – Sixteen-year-old Mohammad Sayed wanted more from his wheelchair. So he started hacking the thing. Sayed is a student at NuVu, an experimental high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts where students learn practical skills through hands-on projects, and for one … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Science Daily) – A new study by researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has shown that tissue-engineered small intestine grown from human cells replicates key aspects of a functioning human intestine. The tissue-engineered small intestine they developed contains important elements … Read More
January 8, 2015
(MIT Technology Review) – Medicine these days entertains all kinds of ambitious plans for reading off brain signals to control wheelchairs, or using electronics to bypass spinal injuries. But most of these ideas for implants that can interface with the … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Nanotechnology Now) – An international team of researchers has developed a drug delivery technique that utilizes graphene strips as “flying carpets” to deliver two anticancer drugs sequentially to cancer cells, with each drug targeting the distinct part of the cell … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Vancouver Sun) – At least two cases of children conceived artificially and born overseas are challenging this country’s hereditary citizenship laws, which stipulate that a child must be genetically related to at least one parent to be considered Canadian. The … Read More
January 8, 2015
(Eurekalert) – UC Irvine scientists studying the role of circadian rhythms in skin stem cells found that this clock plays a key role in coordinating daily metabolic cycles and cell division. Their research, which appears Jan. 6 in Cell Reports, … Read More
January 8, 2015
(NPR) – Big data is a trendy term for the ever-expanding cloud of information that’s online and increasingly searchable. Some researchers say it could change the way medical research is done and the way individual doctors make medical decisions. Others … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Washington Post) – Lost in the extensive media coverage of Mario Cuomo’s recent death was mention of one of the former governor’s most enduring achievements: the New York state biomedical Task Force on Life and the Law. During his … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Guardian) – About half of Afghanistan’s pharmaceutical imports are smuggled and not subject to quality control, according to a recent report by the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC), a watchdog assembled by the international community and … Read More
January 7, 2015
(BBC) – The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists. Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed “very promising”. The last new class of antibiotics to … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Nature) – A mammoth US effort to genetically profile 10,000 tumours has officially come to an end. Started in 2006 as a US$100-million pilot, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is now the biggest component of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Fiscal Times) – Four years ago, just before Christmas, my hospital ran out of cytarabine, an essential drug used to treat and cure certain kinds of acute leukemia. This drug was suddenly in short supply across the nation. At … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Reuters) – Doctors in Belgium have rejected an imprisoned murderer and rapist’s request for medically assisted suicide, the Justice Ministry said on Tuesday, less than a week before he was due to receive a lethal injection. Justice Minister Koen Geens … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Discover Magazine) – Drone pilots represent one of the most crucial and under-appreciated elements of the U.S. military’s operations across the world. They provide hours of support in watching over U.S. troops on the ground, searching for enemy targets and sometimes … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Wall Street Journal) – Women expecting a baby or planning a pregnancy are being pitched a fast-growing array of tests to check if they are carriers for hundreds of mostly rare genetic diseases. Such genetic testing, called carrier screening, … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Johns Hopkins University) – A powerful “genome editing” technology known as CRISPR has been used by researchers since 2012 to trim, disrupt, replace or add to sequences of an organism’s DNA. Now, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that … Read More
January 7, 2015
(National Post) – After a hearing in October, the Supreme Court of Canada is preparing to issue a landmark ruling on euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, marking the first time the top court has addressed the issue since 1993, when … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Phys.org) – If the new nano-machines built at The Ohio State University look familiar, it’s because they were designed with full-size mechanical parts such as hinges and pistons in mind. The project is the first to prove that the same … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Conversation) – An estimated 40% of clinically approved drugs fall into the category where either the natural compound itself or a modified version is the approved drug. These include statins (found in bacterial secretions) used to lower cholesterol, quinines … Read More
January 7, 2015
(Genome Web) – Genentech will sequence the whole genomes of 3,000 people from 23andMe’s Parkinson’s disease community in an effort to identify drug targets, the companies announced today. Under the terms of the deal, 23andMe will be able to conduct … Read More
