After a decade of research, Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have succeeded in reprogramming adult stem cells from the testes of male mice into functional blood vessels and contractile cardiac tissue. The research offers a promising new source of stem cells for use in organ regeneration studies.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved expanding the population for use of the nasal influenza vaccine FluMist to include children between the ages of 2 and 5.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced grants totaling $280 million to help fight tuberculosis, an epidemic that infects one-third of people on earth and kills nearly 2 million yearly—mostly in the poorest countries.
Patients who received hemodialysis at night six times a week for treatment of end-stage kidney disease had improvements on certain outcomes, including reduced need for blood pressure medications and improvement in selected quality of life measures, compared to patients who received conventional hemodialysis three times weekly, according to an article in the September 19 issue of JAMA.
Biopharmaceutical researchers have found a protein in blood they say is linked to all stages of lung cancer but which rarely shows up in the blood of people without the disease. Testing for this protein might help physicians decide whether smokers or others at high risk for lung cancer should be referred for lung imaging, say investigators, who presented their findings today in Atlanta, Georgia at the American Association for Cancer Research’s second International Conference on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development.
Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis Group, announced data showing that its new investigational H5N1 pandemic influenza vaccine containing a proprietary adjuvant achieved a high immune response at the lowest dose of H5N1 antigen reported to date.
Some couples in Israel whose fetus screened positive for Gaucher disease, which can range from being mild and treatable to being a severe disease, decided to have the pregnancy terminated, raising questions concerning the appropriateness of certain types of genetic screenings, according to a study in the September 19 issue of JAMA.
UT Southwestern Medical Center will receive $34 million from the National Institutes of Health to lead a wide-ranging collaborative initiative aimed at speeding the transfer of laboratory discoveries to new therapies that improve human health.
The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou will cull another 10,000 domestic fowls, following the outbreak of the deadly H5N1-type bird flu among ducks, local officials said today.
Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg filed a joint lawsuit against the maker of Vioxx for misrepresenting the dangers the drug posed to its users.