Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
Doctors at the University of Arizona Cancer Center at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix report in Lancet Oncology that a new treatment for ovarian cancer can improve response rates (increase the rate of tumor shrinkage) and prolong the time until cancers recur.
Trebananib (formally known as AMG 386; Amgen) is a first-in-class peptide-Fc fusion protein (or peptibody) that targets angiogenesis (the growth of new blood vessels into cancerous tumors) by inhibiting the binding of both angiopoietin 1 and 2 to the Tie2 receptor.
This is a different mechanism of action than other agents that also effect angiogenesis by inhibiting vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) such as bevacizumab (Avastin; Genentech).
Epidemiologists who analyzed survey questionnaire responses came up with a new way to predict risk of lung cancer - the time you spent before lighting up the first time.
Lung cancer prediction is tricky business - though it is commonly assume that people who smoke will get lung cancer, shockingly few smokers do and almost half of lung cancer patients didn't smoke. There are standard markers that epidemiologists have used to match cancer risk - how many cigarettes per day and even cumulative exposure (pack-years).
The new survey results lead them to suggest that time before first light up may be a predictor for both light and heavy smokers.
People who get a blacklegged tick bite may be getting more pathogens than they expected. A new study found that ticks are almost twice as likely as previously believed to be infected with two pathogens—the bacterium that causes Lyme disease and the protozoan that causes babesiosis.
Almost 30 percent of the ticks were infected with the agent of Lyme disease. One-third of these were also infected with at least one other pathogen. The agents of Lyme disease and babesiosis were found together in 7 percent of ticks.
If you could live longer, would you be weaned on an extreme, emaciating diet?
The search for the foundation of youth has been happening forever and a popular idea in recent years has been caloric restriction - mice weaned on starvation diets live long and a new study of the tiny nematode worm C. elegans finds results even more alarming - it triggered a state of arrested development.
Einstein's theory of relativity conceptualizes time as we would a spatial dimension, like height, width, and depth. But unlike dimensions, time seems to permit motion in only one direction: forward.
This directional asymmetry — the "arrow of time" — is something of a head fake in theoretical physics. It's not a dimension if it's based on three dimensions and it isn't a dimension if it only goes one way. Like an ant walking around a wire in string theory, it makes for fine popular storytelling, but is it science?
It's puzzling how some people can look at a baby and say 'she looks like her dad' - computers have historically been even more limited. While a four-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken", that sort of problem stumps computers.
But next week at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, a University of Central Florida research team is going to show a facial recognition tool that is not only capable of matching pictures of parents and their children but can create accurate photos of missing children who will have aged.
Nature gets a bad rap, according to a new paper. For thousands of years, fickle weather has been blamed for tremendous suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han."
Scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell - by finding a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity.
The more light absorbed by a solar panel's active elements, the more power it will produce. But the light has to get there. Coatings in current use that protect the active elements let most light pass but reflect some as well.
Various strategies have cut reflectance down to about 6 percent but the anti-reflection is limited to a specific range of light, incident angle and wavelength.
Researchers have developed a new technique to control populations of a major livestock pest in Australia and New Zealand.
They genetically modified lines of female Australian sheep blowflies (Lucilia cuprina), making female flies dependent upon a common antibiotic -
tetracycline
- to survive.
Dr. Max Scott, professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, and colleagues say that female blowflies that did not receive the antibiotic died in the late larval or pupal stages, before reaching adulthood. Several genetically modified lines lacking tetracycline showed 100 percent female deaths.
In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings about a potential danger for young people taking antidepressants. The warnings drew intense and outright exaggerated media coverage.
Result: A sudden, steep decline in the number of prescriptions for antidepressants and an increase in suicide attempts by teens and young adults.
Writing in BMJ, researchers at Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute report that in the year following the warnings, when antidepressant prescriptions fell by more than a fifth among young people, there was a relative increase of 21.7 percent in suicide attempts by overdose with psychotropic drugs, and 33.7 percent among young adults.
Parents of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis go on to have fewer kids after the first signs of the disorder manifest or a diagnosis is made, according to an article in JAMA.
Chronic tissue inflammation is typically associated with obesity and metabolic disease, but new research finds that a level of "healthy" inflammation is necessary to prevent metabolic diseases, such as fatty liver.
