Plugging Holes in Blood Vessels Caused by Nanoparticle Therapy
While targeting nanoparticles to attack cancer cells can be effective at reducing primary tumors, they tend to create tiny holes within blood vessel walls that let some cancer cells escape and metastasize elsewhere. This is a serious side effect that may limit the usefulness of many nanoparticle-based cancer therapies in the long run, so researchers at National University of Singapore have been studying this matter and how to address it. The team identified that nanomaterial-induced endothelial leakiness is caused by a variety of nanoparticles, including those made from silica, gold, and titanium dioxide. Moreover, anim...
Source: Medgadget - August 29, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Nanomedicine Oncology Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 19th 2019
In conclusion, our data show how oncogenic and tumor-suppressive drivers of cellular senescence act to regulate surveillance processes that can be circumvented to enable SnCs to elude immune recognition but can be reversed by cell surface-targeted interventions to purge the SnCs that persist in vitro and in patients. Since eliminating SnCs can prevent tumor progression, delay the onset of degenerative diseases, and restore fitness; since NKG2D-Ls are not widely expressed in healthy human tissues and NKG2D-L shedding is an evasion mechanism also employed by tumor cells; and since increasing numbers of B cells express NKG2D ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 18, 2019 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

DigniCap Delta Hair Loss Prevention System for Chemo Now in U.S.
Dignitana, a company out of Lund, Sweden, won FDA clearance and is now distributing its DigniCap Delta scalp cooling system in the U.S. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) will be the first recipient in America of the fourth generation system that’s designed to prevent hair loss in patients undergoing chemotherapy to fight solid tumors. The system pumps a cool liquid, carefully controlled thanks to a number of sensors, through a cap worn by patients undergoing chemo. Cooling the head constricts the blood vessels in the scalp, reducing the amount of chemo that can pass through. At the same time, the ...
Source: Medgadget - August 15, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Medicine Oncology Source Type: blogs

Electromagnetic Fields to Stop Spread of Cancer
After a cancer is discovered in a patient, the biggest fear is that it will metastasize to other parts of the body. Currently, there’s really nothing that doctors can do to alter a cancer’s ability to shed tumor cells that can easily travel far away from their birth site. Now, researchers at Ohio State University have discovered that low intensity electromagnetic fields can be used to halt the ability of cancer cells to spread around the body. What’s particularly remarkable, and will hopefully form the basis for a future medical device, is that the cancer cells change their behavior not only depending ...
Source: Medgadget - August 14, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Oncology Source Type: blogs

Like CD47, CD24 Also Acts as a " Don't Eat Me " Signal and is Abused by Cancer Cells
Cancer cells abuse signals used elsewhere in normal mammalian biochemistry to prevent immune cells from destroying other cells, such as CD47. Interfering in these "don't eat me" signals has produced significant gains in the development of effective cancer therapies that can target multiple types of cancer. Here, researchers describe a newly discovered "don't eat me" signal, CD24, that should allow this class of cancer therapy to be expanded to target cancers that have proved resilient to existing implementations. This and related lines of work that lead to more general anti-cancer platforms are one of the reasons why young...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 14, 2019 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

A Proposal to Improve Healthcare and Make It More Affordable
By STEVE ZECOLA Americans spend about $3 trillion per year on healthcare, or about $10,000 per person per year. Despite these expenditures, Americans are worse off than their international counterparts with respect to infant mortality, life expectancy and the prevalence of chronic conditions. In policy debates, Republicans mostly prefer to let the marketplace devise the appropriate outcomes, but this approach ignores the market failures that plague the industry. On the other hand, Democrats propose a variety of solutions such as “Medicare for All” which nationalizes all healthcare insurance or, as a variant, ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 6, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy Medicare For All Source Type: blogs

Chip Captures Circulating Tumor Cells, Keeps Them Alive
Cancer metastasis continues to pose difficulties for clinicians. Tumors shed cells which travel throughout the body and attach themselves at distant sites, causing new tumors to sprout. These so-called circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are extremely rare and difficult to pick out from whole blood, in part because they’re often a similar size to white blood cells. While researchers have built various devices that filter out CTCs from whole blood, they have all suffered from either poor performance, high cost, or an inability to capture relevant cellular clusters. Many also end up killing the very CTCs that are captured a...
Source: Medgadget - August 6, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Oncology Source Type: blogs

The Impact Of Digital Health Technologies On The Future of Medical Specialties In One Infographic
Will digital assistants prescribe medication, will smart algorithms diagnose patients with malignant lesions based on CT scans, while robot surgeons do the dirty work in the OR 20 years from now, ousting doctors completely? Highly unlikely, but there are many fears around the advancement of digital health technology up to a point of medical professionals becoming superfluous. While we believe that fears about technology, especially A.I., replacing physicians are unfounded, we should acknowledge the impact of fast-paced innovation happening in healthcare on the various medical specialties. That’s what our latest infograph...
Source: The Medical Futurist - August 6, 2019 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine Medical Professionals digital digital health doctor impact infographic infographics Innovation medical specialties medical specialty nurse physician technology Source Type: blogs

How My Weight Gain Contributed to My Son ’ s Disordered Eating
Ever since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1991, I’ve struggled with my weight. At that time, I weighed 125 and was prescribed lithium to control my highs and lows. The drug worked, but it and other psychotropic drugs contributed to a 20-pound weight gain. Then, as the years went by, I gained the weight that comes with aging. By 40, I weighed about 180. On a 5’3″ frame, this was a lot to carry. I gained even more weight when I struggled with breast cancer in my late 40s and 50s. At 56, I weighed a cool 188 with no clothes on. Recently, I gained even more (I contribute this gain to simply overindulgen...
Source: World of Psychology - July 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Laura Yeager Tags: Anorexia Children and Teens Eating Disorders Habits Health-related Parenting Personal Adolescence Diet Food Addiction Lithium Weight Gain Source Type: blogs

FDA Approves Bayer GBCA for Coronary Artery Disease
This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light approval to Bayer AG ’s gadobutrol (Gadavist), a gadolinium-based contrast agent (GBCA) used in cardiac MRI procedures for patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease. It’s the first and only approved agent for this type of procedure. “We now have an approved contrast agent for use in cardiac MRI to assess perfusion and late gadolinium enhancement in less than 1 hour, ” saidScott Flamm, MD who co-authored a statement on using the GBCA in myocardial perfusion studies. Gadavist is also used to evaluate the blood supply to the heart...
Source: radRounds - July 19, 2019 Category: Radiology Authors: Julie Morse Source Type: blogs

New Nanoparticles to Stop Growth of HER2-Positive Breast Cancer
HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2) is a protein that is associated with some particularly aggressive forms of breast cancer. The presence of high concentrations of this protein seems to lead to the growth of tumors, so inactivating HER2 may help to stop the spread of certain strains of cancer in the body. An existing technique involves introducing an antibody that can block HER2 from binding to other things, but now researchers at Nanjing University in China have developed a polymer nanoparticle that can bind to HER2 just as well as antibodies. These nanoparticles can halt the normal functionality of H...
Source: Medgadget - July 17, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Ob/Gyn Oncology Source Type: blogs

ProFound AI for 2D Mammography Cleared in Europe to Spot Potential Breast Tumors
iCAD, a company based in Nashua, New Hampshire, won European CE Mark approval for its ProFound AI for 2D Mammography software system. The product relies on a “high-functioning, deep learning” artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze 2D mammography scans and point out potential areas of concern. The software package provides “Certainty of Finding” and “Case Scores” for each instance of a suspect lesion that it identifies, helping radiologists better focus on what’s important while quickening and improving the quality of diagnosis. The system works by noticing slight c...
Source: Medgadget - July 16, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Ob/Gyn Radiology Surgery Source Type: blogs

Carbon Dioxide-Based Cancer Cryoablation Probe for Low-Resource Regions
Undergraduate researchers at John Hopkins University have developed a cryoablation probe for breast cancer, which uses carbon dioxide instead of argon, making it more affordable and accessible for use in low resource regions.   Treatments for women with breast cancer are scarce in poorer places. In fact, survival rates can be as low as 12% for breast cancer patients in places such as The Gambia, compared with 90% in the United States. Treatments that are commonly used in wealthier countries, such as surgery or chemotherapy, are either too expensive or impractical in poorer and more remote regions, where women frequ...
Source: Medgadget - July 15, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Oncology Surgery Source Type: blogs

Scientists Develop New Probe to Light Up Cancer
A team of researchers in Ireland has collaborated on developing a new fluorescent molecular probe that can hone in on and light up cancer in an exciting new way. The technology will hopefully have important consequences for cancer resection surgeries, allowing physicians to remove tumors while sparing healthy tissues. Previously developed fluorescent molecular probes are hampered by the fluorescence of some naturally-occuring molecules within our bodies. The signal-to-noise ratio is not very high and it takes a while for such probes to accumulate in and sufficiently illuminate a tumor. However, this team created what th...
Source: Medgadget - July 11, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Diagnostics Materials Oncology Pathology Surgery Source Type: blogs

Advancing Trainee Leaders and Scholars (ATLAS): A New Initiative From Academic Medicine
Academic Medicine recently launched the Advancing Trainee Leaders and Scholars (ATLAS) initiative, which I will oversee as the journal’s inaugural Assistant Editor for Trainee Engagement. So, you might be wondering, who am I and why ATLAS? I hope this blog post will help answer those questions! Who am I? I’m a 3rd-year internal medicine resident at NYU Langone Health in New York City, and am planning to pursue a career as an academic hospitalist. As mentioned above, I will serve as the inaugural Assistant Editor for Trainee Engagement, overseeing the ATLAS initiative. My term will last until summer 2020, when we ...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - July 9, 2019 Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Guest Author Tags: ATLAS Featured learners Source Type: blogs