Kosali Simon, PhD, M.A., a professor with the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and a Regenstrief Institute research scientist; and Katherine Baicker, PhD, University of Chicago provost, will co-lead an expected nearly $16 million National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging (NIA) program to explore critical aspects of healthcare delivery for individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

APL has contributed to a new study in The Lancet Public Health that found public-private partnerships to develop, produce and distribute COVID-19 diagnostic tests saved approximately 1.4 million lives and prevented an estimated 7 million patient hospitalizations in the U.S. during the pandemic.

In April 2021, a provision in the 21st Century Cures act took effect which required that all medical test results be released to a patient’s electronic medical record as soon as they become available. As a result of this newer law, many patients are seeing and reading their test results even before their doctor has. The problem is that many medical reports aren’t written with patients in mind. 

Interactions with friends and family may keep us healthy because they boost our immune system and reduce our risk of diseases such as heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, new research suggests. Researchers drew this conclusion after studying proteins from blood samples taken from over 42,000 adults recruited to the UK Biobank. Their findings are published today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Tumor cells circulating in the blood are the “germ cells” of breast cancer metastases. They are very rare and could not be propagated in the culture dish until now, which made research into therapy resistance difficult. A team from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the Heidelberg Stem Cell Institute HI-STEM* and the NCT Heidelberg** has now succeeded for the first time in cultivating stable tumor organoids directly from blood samples of breast cancer patients. Using these mini-tumors, the researchers were able to decipher a molecular signaling pathway that ensures the cancer cells' survival and resistance to therapy. With this knowledge, the team was able to develop an approach to specifically eliminate these tumor cells in lab experiments.