Researchers have developed a functional precision medicine approach that targets cancer by combining genetic testing with a new way to test individual drugs on tumor samples. The results of the clinical study were published today in Nature Medicine.

This combined approach, developed by Florida International University cancer researcher Diana Azzam, was used successfully for the first time to guide treatment of relapsed pediatric cancer patients in collaboration with First Ascent Biomedical and Dr. Maggie Fader at the Helen & Jacob Shaham Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami.

Thiazolidinediones (TZDs) are a class of drug that can be used to treat type 2 diabetes by reversing insulin resistance, one of the main hallmarks of the disease. While TZDs were extremely popular in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, they have fallen out of use among physicians in recent decades because they were discovered to cause unwanted side effects, including weight gain and excess fluid accumulation in body tissues.

Infection with the influenza virus leads to lung injury through inflammation over-activation that causes collateral damage to cells required for breathing. Such damage can be life-threatening, but scientists have a new preventative treatment. A team from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, University of Houston, Tufts University School of Medicine and Fox Chase Cancer Center created a drug that can prevent flu-induced lung injury. In a mouse model, the drug achieves a novel balance between shutting down runaway inflammation and allowing the immune system to stop the virus.

Swapping red meat for 'forage fish', such as herring, sardines, and anchovies, could save up to 750,000 lives a year in 2050 and significantly reduce the prevalence of disability as a result of diet-related disease, suggests a data analysis published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health.

Adopting this type of diet would be especially helpful for low and middle income countries, where these fish are cheap and plentiful, and where the toll taken by heart disease, in particular, is high, say the researchers.

A new study by Upstate Medical University researchers shows that recreational cannabis use may offer protection against cognitive decline.

The study, done by Master of Public Health (MPH) student Zhi Chen and Professor Roger Wong, Ph.D., MPH, MSW, analyzed a large data set from the CDC and found that compared to non-users, non-medical cannabis use, such as for recreational purposes, was significantly associated with 96 percent decreased odds of subjective cognitive decline (SCD).

The lab of Yongchao C. Ma, PhD, at Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago discovered a fundamental biological mechanism that could lead to new treatments for neurological diseases, such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and autism, as well as different cancers. The study was published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.

Dr. Ma's team found that chemical modification of RNA (called RNA methylation) regulates mitochondrial function.

The Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) protein mediates signaling from several cytokine receptors in the regulation of hematopoiesis and immune responses. Somatic mutations in human JAK2 lead to constitutive activation and cytokine-independent signaling and underlie several hematological malignancies from myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) to acute leukemia and lymphomas. JAK2 contains an active kinase domain and an inactive pseudokinase domain. Interestingly, pathogenic mutations mainly occur in the regulatory pseudokinase domain.