News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers have developed the first blood test that can accurately detect more than 50 types of cancer and identify in which tissue the cancer originated, often before there are any signs of the disease. The test has a false positive rate of less than 1% meaning that less than 1% of people would be wrongly identified as having cancer. It can correctly predict the tissue in which the cancer originated in 93% of samples. The study is published in Annals of Oncology.

The Wasan Laboratory in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia in partnership with iCo Therapeutics Inc. (Vancouver BC, Canada) have developed a novel oral formulation of Amphotericin B to treat systemic fungal and parasitic infections.

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.

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.

The blood-thinning drug heparin is used all over the world. But, the underlying sugar structures of heparin and the wider family of heparan sulfate sugars in cells have not been fully mapped. Now, a research group headed by a recent recruit from the UK, Dr Rebecca Miller at the University of Copenhagen has invented a method to map this type of sugar structure in detail. This method has vast potential to reveal important biological functions and allow new drugs to be developed.

Abdominal arterial (or aortic) aneurysm in older men is associated with levels of certain subtypes of white blood cells, a study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows. The study results belong to an expanding research field that is expected improve both knowledge of the disease and treatment options.

City of Hope scientists have found a toxic fungus previously thought to not be infectious in the sinus tissues of a man with refractory acute lymphocytic leukemia. This is the first time that direct infection of a patient with the black mold Stachybotrys has been recorded. The team's findings published this week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.