Latest Clinical & Research News
A collaborative research team at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) has received a grant to study immunotherapy resistance in head and neck cancer. The team is one of a handful to receive a multi-year cancer immunotherapy research grant this year from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the Cancer Moonshot℠ program.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been on the forefront of nephrology for decades: in 1954, the hospital was the site of the first successful living-donor kidney transplant. Today, the Brigham continues its legacy of innovation in kidney dialysis research and care through its Interventional Nephrology service at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, one of the few programs of its kind in the country.
Progress in creating and evaluating a tau biomarker test at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is spurring rapid movement toward a blood-based screen to diagnose or predict risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) perhaps without the need for spinal fluid or imaging.
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Image: Some tumors can shed free-floating DNA into the blood. Emerging technologies have the potential to detect these abnormal DNA signals, laying the groundwork for a blood test which could be used for cancer detection.
As next-generation genomic sequencing has become faster and more affordable, a significant aim in cancer research has been the development of so-called liquid biopsies. Those blood tests, some of which are now being evaluated in clinical trials, are used in people who already are known to have cancer. They aim to uncover specific driver mutations that can match tumors with a particular targeted therapy while also enabling patients to avoid more-invasive types of biopsies.
Women who have type 2 diabetes (T2D) without cardiovascular disease have impaired coronary flow reserve (CFR) compared to men. CFR—the ratio of stimulated to rest myocardial blood flow (MBF) assessed by cardiac PET—is a well-established indicator of coronary microvascular dysfunction and predictor of death.
It’s not uncommon for people who have neurological disorders to experience behavioral and emotional symptoms. The field of neuropsychiatry is dedicated to addressing this issue and bringing a neurobiological understanding to the field of psychiatry.
Thanks to imaging technologies like CT, MRI and PET, researchers who study the brain are able to peer inside its “black box” to learn how different parts of the brain interact and how those interactions change in response to disease or injury.
Arranging psychiatric care can be a logistical challenge. Appointments usually need to be scheduled months in advance, and missed visits may result in removal from patient rolls. This situation is often a critical obstacle to care, especially because people who require psychiatric care are likely to struggle to deal with these sorts of challenges.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital are collaborating with colleagues at Harvard Medical School to examine the use of gene therapy for treating four age-related diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart failure and kidney failure.
Nearly 71 million people globally are projected to be displaced from their homes due to disasters, conflicts and disease outbreaks by the end of 2019. Citizens of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are disproportionately victimized in humanitarian crises like these, with an average displacement duration of 27 years.