The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved Invega (paliperidone) extended-release tablets for the treatment of schizophrenia. Paliperidone is a new molecular entity, which means this medication contains an active substance that has never before been approved for marketing in any form in the United States.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have pinpointed a key regulatory protein that translates blood flow into gene expression. The investigators showed that in a model of mouse embryonic development a transcription factor called Klf2, which resides in cells that line blood vessels, is activated by rapid, pulsed blood flow. Understanding Klf2’s role in blood vessel and muscle biology could help with fighting atherosclerosis.
Xabier L?pez Aranguren, a biologist and biochemist at the University of Navarra, has studied in his doctoral dissertation the use of adult stem cells in order to palliate damage to the tissues affected by cardiovascular diseases, which are one of the leading causes of death in the Western world. The results of his research have recently been published in the journal Blood.
Researchers at Mayo Clinic have successfully isolated nanoparticles from human kidney stones in cell cultures and have isolated proteins, RNA and DNA that appear to be associated with nanoparticles.
Blood transfusions save the lives of millions of heart surgery patients and others each year. But a new study suggests that patients who receive transfusions during heart bypass surgery have a higher risk of developing potentially dangerous infections, and dying, after their operation.
Over the past 3 decades, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, or balloon angioplasty) has significantly changed the treatment of coronary artery disease (narrowing of the arteries supplying the heart muscle). Unlike the more invasive coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, angioplasty is a nonsurgical procedure in which a tiny catheter with a balloon is inserted into the coronary artery.
Whether reopening narrowed kidney arteries benefits patients is a $1.7 billion question a North American study hopes to answer.
People with low levels of LDL cholesterol are more likely to have Parkinson’s disease than people with high LDL levels, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers.
The female hormone estrogen may hold important clues for scientists working on new therapies for colon cancer, a study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers suggests.
HIV-infected patients undergoing surgical procedures may be more likely to develop pneumonia after surgery and to die within 12 months than those without HIV, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In addition, HIV patients with a preoperative viral load (number of copies of the virus in the blood) greater than 30,000 per milliliter appear to have increased risk of surgical complications.