Research News and Research

RSS

SomaLogic, Novartis enter multi-year research agreement

SomaLogic, Inc., announced today that it has entered into a multi-year research agreement with Novartis to use its unique proprietary proteomics technology to accelerate Novartis' drug discovery and development efforts.

19 Oct 2011

Population growth calls for new technologies, reduction in fertility rates

The world's population is expected to reach seven billion this month, which is "cause for profound global concern" and begs the question of "can we enjoy 'sustainable development' on a very crowded planet?" Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writes in a CNN opinion piece.

19 Oct 2011

American Academy of Pediatrics expands guidelines on safe sleep for babies

Since the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended all babies should be placed on their backs to sleep in 1992, deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome have declined dramatically. But sleep-related deaths from other causes, including suffocation, entrapment and asphyxia, have increased.

19 Oct 2011

Republicans looking ahead with plans to dismantle health law

GOP activists, who increasingly consider both the Senate and White House to be within reach, are developing multi-pronged strategies to roll-back the health law beginning in 2013.

19 Oct 2011

IAN survey to study impact of bullying on children with ASD

Today, the Interactive Autism Network (IAN Project) launches a national survey to study the impact of bullying on children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Bullying, a pervasive problem among youth, has attracted the national spotlight in recent months because of the lasting, and sometimes tragic, effects on children and teenagers across the country.

19 Oct 2011

Russia pledges money to support HIV, TB programs in neighboring countries

"Russia plans to step up its international role in fighting infectious disease across eastern Europe and central Asia, in what some observers see as the latest effort by the Kremlin to reassert its political influence over its former Soviet neighbors," the Financial Times reports.

19 Oct 2011

Climate change could be detrimental to global health, conference attendees say

Environmental health experts, scientists and government officials attending a conference in London sponsored by the British Medical Journal on Monday "issued a statement warning that climate change could not only bring a global health catastrophe but could threaten global stability and security as well, a journal release said," UPI.com reports.

19 Oct 2011

Scott & White to create internships for doctoral psychology students

Scott & White Healthcare in Temple is one of three sites chosen for a $1.6 million initiative to create internships for doctoral psychology students that will help alleviate mental health workforce shortages in Texas.

19 Oct 2011

HHS begins 'Innovation Advisors' program

The Health and Human Services Department on Monday launched a new component of its effort to make health care better and more efficient. HHS announced its "Innovation Advisors" program, through which it will select as many as 200 experts to work with doctors and other providers on ways to improve the health care delivery system.

19 Oct 2011

New sequencing method can identify genetic variants linked to ASD

Geneticists at Emory University School of Medicine have demonstrated a method that enables the routine amplification of all the genes on the X chromosome. The technology allows the rapid and highly accurate sequencing and identification of novel genetic variants affecting X chromosome genes.

19 Oct 2011

Donors need to look beyond emergency funding to long-term, strategic solutions

"Americans are among the most generous people in the world, giving more money to charities than citizens of any other nation in the world," but "much of our charity goes to disaster relief," entrepreneur and philanthropist Sheila Johnson writes in an opinion piece in the Huffington Post's "Black Voices."

19 Oct 2011

Confusion reigns after Obama administration suspends CLASS program

Even though the White House signaled that the long-term insurance program will not be implemented, President Barack Obama made clear yesterday that he is opposed to the measure's repeal. Meanwhile, the decision to suspend the plan from going forward has left many experts to ask what's next in the effort to address the nation's long-term care issues.

19 Oct 2011

RetroSense, WSU sign license agreement for channelrhodopsin-based approaches

RetroSense Therapeutics, LLC, a Michigan-based company, announced that it has executed its exclusive, worldwide option and signed a license agreement for novel gene-therapy approaches for treating blindness developed at Wayne State University's School of Medicine.

19 Oct 2011

Aspen Institute panel speakers call for increased aid for women to help plan families

A panel hosted by the Aspen Institute's Global Leaders Council on Monday called for "a boost of aid for women in developing countries such as Somalia to help them control their fertility," Agence France-Presse reports. "Somalia has the eighth highest birth rate in the world, and the average family has seven children," and "one percent of married women in Somalia have access to modern contraception, ... according to data compiled by the Population Reference Bureau," the news agency notes.

19 Oct 2011

Use of social media to fight malaria shows 'great promise'

As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosts the second international Malaria Forum in Seattle this week, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, in this entry in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog reflects on the advances made in the fight against malaria since the first Malaria Forum four years ago.

19 Oct 2011

Many hospital readmission risk prediction tools have poor discriminative ability

A review and analysis of 26 validated hospital readmission risk prediction models finds that most, whether for hospital comparison or clinical purposes, have poor predictive ability, according to an article in the October 19 issue of JAMA.

19 Oct 2011

Report estimates human impact of cuts to U.S. global health spending over next five years

"Thousands of lives and years of gains made against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria could be lost if proportional reductions are made to achieve the $1.2 trillion in spending reductions required by the Budget Control Act of 2011," according to a report issued on Monday by the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports.

19 Oct 2011

New form of respiratory distress syndrome in newborn mice

A discovery by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies might explain why some premature infants fail to respond to existing treatments for a deadly respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and offers clues for new ways to treat the breathing disorder.

19 Oct 2011

States juggling Medicaid requirements, costs, coverage

Medicaid managed-care plans in Florida's five Medicaid "reform" counties have been granted a 10.8 percent rate increase because of ever-increasing hospital costs, the president of Florida Association of Health Plans confirmed today. Meanwhile, said Michael Garner, the managed-care plans in most counties of the state were granted an average 1.3 percent rate increase.

19 Oct 2011

Young adults born prematurely show multiple biological signs of risks to future health

Young adults who were born prematurely show multiple biological signs of risks to future health, research from Imperial College London has found. The scientists, reporting their findings tomorrow in the journal Pediatric Research, say that the research indicates that urgent work is now needed to monitor preterm babies into adulthood to improve the detection of early signs of disease.

19 Oct 2011