Issue 90  March 15th 2019

Strategies on how to decide upon and provide necessary STAT testing

What are the best ways to tackle this confounding STAT issue with its potentially significant impact on patient care played out in an arena fraught with clinical egos (my patients and time are more important than yours)?

A second patient cured of HIV: Are we close to a cure for everyone infected?

Although the search for a vaccine or cure for HIV/AIDS has remained elusive, there are now two people who are reported to be cured of this devastating disease. On March 4, 2019, The New York Times reported that a study to be published the next day in the journal, Nature, details a second patient who has been cured of HIV through a stem cell transplant.

Blood holds key to liver regeneration

The liver is the only organ in the body that can regenerate. But some patients who undergo a liver resection, a surgery that removes a diseased portion of the organ, end up needing a transplant because the renewal process doesn't work.

A new Michigan State University study, published in the journal Blood, shows that the blood-clotting protein fibrinogen may hold the key as to why this happens.

A step closer to precision medicine? Gene editing process leads to personalized advice for heart patient

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a stem cell–based test to determine whether genetic variants in heart muscle cells are benign or pathogenic. In other words, they’ve added some certainty to variants of uncertain significance (VUS)—the tricky alleles that can either contribute to the development of diseases or be completely harmless.

Unsecured medical records put patients' health at risk

Researchers stress the importance of preparing hospital and clinical laboratory information systems before a ‘major failure’ occurs.

Medical laboratory information systems (LIS) and similar devices are vulnerable to hacking, according to physicians and computer scientists from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of California Davis (UCD). They recently completed a study that exposed the vulnerabilities of these systems and revealed how clinical laboratory test results can be manipulated and exploited to put patient lives at risk.

Hormone made our ancestors warm-blooded but left us susceptible to heart damage

Although most victims survive the 735,000 heart attacks that occur annually in the U.S., their heart tissue is often irreparably damaged—unlike many other cells in the body, once injured, heart cells cannot regenerate. According to a new UC San Francisco study, the issue may date back to our earliest mammalian ancestors, which may have lost the ability to regenerate heart tissue in exchange for endothermy—or as it’s known colloquially, “warm-bloodedness”—a Faustian evolutionary bargain that ushered in the age of mammals but left modern humans vulnerable to irreparable tissue damage after heart attack.

Dynamic molecular changes during the first week of human life follow a robust developmental trajectory

Systems biology can unravel complex biology but has not been extensively applied to human newborns, a group highly vulnerable to a wide range of diseases. The researchers optimized methods to extract transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, cytokine/chemokine, and single cell immune phenotyping data from <1 ml of blood, a volume readily obtained from newborns. Indexing to baseline and applying innovative integrative computational methods reveals dramatic changes along a remarkably stable developmental trajectory over the first week of life. This is most evident in changes of interferon and complement pathways, as well as neutrophil-associated signaling.