Archive for month: August, 2020

A scan that offers patients a less invasive test, sometimes called a

What we don’t appreciate is the vital role that our own natural biomolecules play in the healing process, including their contribution to the growth of new cells and the development of new blood vessels that provide nutrients to those cells.
Now, UCLA researchers led by Heather Maynard, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, are working to take advantage of our body’s ability to heal itself by developing new bio-mimicking therapeutics that could be used to treat skin wounds.

Among the key players involved in natural wound-healing is a signalling molecule known as basic fibroblast growth factor, or bFGF, which is secreted by our cells to trigger processes that are involved in healing, as well as embryonic development, tissue regeneration, bone regeneration, the development and maintenance of the nervous system, and stem cell renewal.

bFGF has been widely investigated as a tool doctors could potentially use to promote or accelerate these processes, but its instability outside the body has been a significant hurdle to its widespread use, Maynard said.

Now, Maynard and her team have discovered how to stabilise bFGF based on the principle of mimicry. Relying on the growth factor’s ability to bind heparin

Advances in electronic medical record systems and health information exchange are shifting efforts in public health toward greater use of information systems to automate disease surveillance, but a study from the Regenstrief Institute has found that these technologies’ capabilities are under-utilised by those on the front lines of preventing and reporting infections.

The new study measured the awareness, adoption and use of electronic medical record systems and health information exchange by hospital-based infection preventionists (formerly known as infection control professionals) to report and share information critical to public health. Infection preventionists are often responsible for reporting information on patients diagnosed with health-care-acquired infections like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, as well as sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia.

Prior research at Regenstrief and other academic institutions has shown that health information exchange can increase the completeness and timeliness of infection reporting to local and state health agencies. In this study, the researchers found that half of the infection preventionists surveyed were unaware of whether their hospital or health system participated in a health information exchange. Only 10 percent of infection preventionists indicated that their organisations were formally engaged in health information exchange activities.

While 70 percent of infection preventionists surveyed reported access to an electronic medical record system, less than 20 percent were involved in the design, selection or implementation of the system. Without such involvement, those surveyed indicated the information systems often did not include modules or components that supported infection control activities.

‘There is a push from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to reduce hospital-acquired infections and increase the use of electronic health record systems,’ said lead author Brian Dixon, MPA, Ph.D., Regenstrief Institute investigator and assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. ‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are encouraging local and state health departments to use health information technologies to improve infectious disease reporting and prevention activities. We found that while hospital-based infection preventionists — the people on the front line — may have access to health information technology, they lack specially designed computer tools needed to sift through the massive amounts of data in electronic medical records.

Indiana University

Researchers at UCLA report that they have refined a method they previously developed for capturing and analysing cancer cells that break away from patients’ tumours and circulate in the blood. With the improvements to their device, which uses a Velcro-like nanoscale technology, they can now detect and isolate single cancer cells from patient blood samples for analysis.
Circulating tumour cells, or CTCs, play a crucial role in cancer metastasis, spreading from tumours to other parts of the body, where they form new tumours. When these cells are isolated from the blood early on, they can provide doctors with critical information about the type of cancer a patient has, the characteristics of the individual cancer and the potential progression of the disease. Doctors can also tell from these cells how to tailor a personalised treatment to a specific patient.
In recent years, a UCLA research team led by Hsian-Rong Tseng, an associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging and a member of both the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, has developed a ‘NanoVelcro’ chip. When blood is passed through the chip, extremely small ‘hairs’

Cambridge scientists have honed techniques originally developed to spot distant galaxies and used them to identify biomarkers that signal a cancer