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In order to advance innovation and keep pace with the rapidly evolving healthcare industry, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is modernizing the approval process most medical device manufacturers undergo when bringing new products to market.

New research suggests that exposure to childhood adversity is associated with reduced cognitive control and alterations in key brain networks. The findings, which appear in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could help explain the link between childhood adversity and depression.

“My work focuses on how we can use objective biomarkers to aid in clinical decision making,” said study author Scott A. Langenecker of the University of Utah.

“One challenging clinical decision point is what to do when individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. Do we continue treatment? Do we exercise regular check-ins? Or do we just wait and see?”

Continue reading “Childhood adversity linked to reduced inhibitory control and alterations in key brain networks” »

Kids with peanut allergies haven’t had many options, but that first-of-their-kind treatments could change that as soon as 2019.

As local, federal, and international policies targeting the quality of the air we breathe continue to evolve, questions arise of how effective existing policies have been in improving human health. For example, how many lives have been saved by tough air pollution policies? How many illnesses have been caused by lax policies?

Annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution declined in the United States between 1990 (left) and 2010 (right), leading to thousands of lives saved, according to researcher Jason West.

Continue reading “NASA Science Shows Human Impact of Clean Air Policies” »

Virginia Tech announced Thursday it will receive a record $50 million gift to support biomedical research, a landmark donation for the public university that will expand the influence of its academic health center in Roanoke.

The gift comes from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust and from Heywood and Cynthia Fralin. It is twice as large as the previous record, a $25 million donation from Alice and Bill Goodwin for an engineering building that opened in 2014 on the university’s main campus in Blacksburg.

The new funding will help the university recruit and retain researchers, a spokesman said. A biomedical research institute will be named for the Fralin family and based within the Virginia Tech Carilion Academic Health Center.

Continue reading “Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis” »

One of the biggest obstacles to transplanting organs from one person to another is that the immune system of the person getting the new life-saving organ often tries to reject it. The immune cells see the new material as “foreign” and attacks it, sometimes destroying it.

Right now, the only way to prevent that is by using powerful immunosuppressive drugs to keep the patient’s immune system at bay and protect the new organ. It’s effective, but it also comes with some long-term health consequences.

But now researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel say they may have found a way around that, using the patient’s own stem cells.

Continue reading “Scientists say they’re one step closer to being able to build a new you, using your own stem cells” »

What the study shows, the researchers said, is that the interactions between the bacterial populations are as significant to the host’s overall fitness as their presence — the microbiome’s influence cannot be solely attributed to the presence or absence of individual species. “In a sense,” said Jones, “the microbiome’s influence on the host is more than the sum of its parts.”

The gut microbiome — the world of microbes that inhabit the human intestinal tract — has captured the interest of scientists and clinicians for its critical role in health. However, parsing which of those microbes are responsible for effects on our wellbeing remains a mystery.

Taking us one step closer to solving this puzzle, UC Santa Barbara physicists Eric Jones and Jean Carlson have developed a mathematical approach to analyze and model interactions between gut bacteria in fruit flies. This method could lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interactions between human gut microbes.

Continue reading “Modeling the Microbiome” »

The longer-term answer is to develop and scale up the quantum communication network and, subsequently, the quantum internet. This will take major investments from governments. However, countries will benefit from the greater security offered13. For example, Canada keeps its census data secret for 92 years, a term that only quantum cryptography can assure. Government agencies could use quantum-secured blockchain platforms to protect citizens’ personal financial and health data. Countries leading major research efforts in quantum technologies, such as China, the United States and members of the European Union, will be among the early adopters. They should invest immediately in research. Blockchains should be a case study for Europe’s Quantum Key Distribution Testbed programme, for example.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky.

Conditions encountered in the womb — when the embryo consists of only about 100 cells — can have life-long impact on health. Scientists previously assumed that this is because embryos respond to adverse conditions by programming their gene expression. Now an international team of researchers at the Leiden University Medical Center, Wageningen University and Research, Lund University, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York propose a radically different alternative. Rather than being programmed by the environment, random differences in gene expression may provide some embryos with a survival advantage, in particular when conditions are harsh. By studying DNA methylation, an important mechanism to control gene activity, the researchers found that a specific part of the DNA methylation pattern was missing among famine-exposed individuals. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports.