Category Archives: In the News

A Method to Barcode Cancer Cells, New Lung Cancer Guidelines and More…

Posted on by

Surfing the web I uncovered these news items worth sharing:

  • The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care released new lung cancer guidelines that recommend that current and former smokers between the ages of 55 and 74, who are at high risk of developing lung cancer, should be screened annually for up to three years with low-dose CT scans.
  • According to researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Twitter may be effective in recruiting cancer patients for clinical trials. Read more about their findings in JAMA Oncology.
  • Researchers at the University of Louisville have found a link between Porphyromonas gingivalis, the bacterial species that causes gingivitis, and esophageal cancer. The results of their study were published in Infectious Agents and Cancer.
  • Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a new method called PRISM (Profiling Relative Inhibition Simultaneously in Mixtures) to uniquely barcode more than 100 cancer cells. These DNA barcodes could ultimately aide in the development of new drugs to fight cancer. Read more on their findings in Nature Biotechnology.

An Exciting Nomination by President Obama and Tidbits on Digital Data in this Edition of Blog Buzz

Posted on by

President Obama has announced his intention “to nominate Carla D. Hayden as Librarian of Congress.” More in this press release.

  • An American Libraries blog post on the announcement quotes a statement from current ALA President, Sari Feldman applauding the selection of Hayden – who is a former ALA President and the current Head of Baltimore’s Pratt Library.
  • Inside Higher Ed reported that her nomination drew support from library groups, and that Librarian of Congress nominations rarely face delays in congress, however this NY Times coverage was less rosy that her confirmation was certain.
  • The LOC has an important role to play, not just for libraries, but also because of copyright and information law. From this summer, here was Jessamyn West’s wishlist for the next Librarian of Congress.

Via Gary Price on the Library Journal’s InfoDocket, researchers at Georgia Tech (a report from the University site (which links to the the study) here) have published a study showing how ad networks and personalized in-ap advertising could leak the sensitive data of mobile phone users to app developers.

And also in digital privacy news, The NY Times reported E.U. and U.S. Released Details on Trans-Atlantic Data Transfer Deal.

Using AI to find Hidden Clues in Medical Records, a Drug that Thinks it’s a Virus, and a Grant to Study Prescription Price Models

Posted on by

MSK in the news this week…

The Gunner Rätsch Lab at Sloan Kettering Institute is working on training an artificial intelligence to identify similarities between cancer cases that human doctors might miss. The software algorithm combs through over 100 million sentences taken from anonymized clinical notes of 200,000 people with cancer, and sorts symptoms, medical histories, and doctors’ observations into clusters. These clusters are then analyzed to look for patterns and connections between different comments and treatments. “We’re looking to exhaust all that data to try to find something interesting” says Rätsch.

Previous studies showed a murine norovirus that can enhance intestinal immune system development. Researchers from the Eric Pamer Lab at Sloan Kettering Institute have identified a molecule that mimics this norovirus, which reduces Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE), a very serious hospital acquired pathogen, in mice. This molecule, a synthetic ligand called Resiquimod (R848) mimics the virus-derived RNA and binds directly to the protein TLR7 in the immune pathway. However, lead author Michael Abt warns, “It’s going to take a lot more research before it can get us to an actual therapeutic.”

M.C. Abt et al., “TLR-7 activation enhances IL-22 mediated colonization resistance against vancomycin,” Science Translational Medicine, doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf33802, 2016. Continue reading →