Medical Journal July 2026 Digital Edition
July 27, 20261 min
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Court temporarily halts Department of Education’s restrictive definition of “professional degree”
July 27, 20267 min
BY Jordan T. Vogel, Esq. and Michael R. Alexander, Esq., Brown & Fortunato, P.C. In a recent development, a federal district court granted a request to preliminarily set aside and stay implementation of the Department of Education’s new definition of “professional degree.” As you may recall, the Department of Education recently defined the term “professional degree” to exclude certain health care fields, including nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, certified nurse midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists,...
Why doing many of the right things still may not be enough to transform care delivery
July 27, 202625 min
BY Christy Lemak, Executive Vice President, Research & Learning, Scottsdale Institute, and Anwesha Dutta, Managing Director, Deloitte, Maulesh Shukla, Research Lead, Deloitte, Bill Fera, Principal, Deloitte Consulting, Dr. Jay Bhatt, Managing Director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, and Madhushree Wagh, Senior Research Analyst, Deloitte In a new care delivery transformation index, surveyed health systems scored themselves 2.7 out of 5 on the ability to turn transformation efforts into scaled, AI-enabled operations. Most health system leaders...
BY Samuel Mathis MD Recently, my social media feed has been filled with advertisements for a new vagus nerve stimulator that works by using a device around the neck. These devices promise everything from improved heart rate, better sleep, lower cortisol levels, improved gut health, and improved mood and anxiety levels. As with any integrative therapy, I am skeptical of anything that sounds too good to be true. This led me to research external...
Texas Sets the Standard
July 27, 20266 min
BY John Hawkins, President/CEO, Texas Hospital Association Charity Care and Community Benefits are vital to the health of Texans, and our hospitals exceed expectations when it comes to care. Texas leads the nation in uninsured residents – but it also leads in stepping up for them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a choice our hospitals make every day, and one worth defending. Charity care and community benefits are essential to the well-being of our state,...
With a $4M grant from the National Institutes of Health, a University of Houston pioneer in autoimmune research, Chandra Mohan, is launching a 10-year study set to target the very heart of autoimmune disease – examining what causes the body to attack itself and identifying biological pathways that could become targets for new treatments. The debilitating array of Systemic Autoimmune Rheumatic Diseases (SARD) includes Rheumatoid Arthritis, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Sjogren’s Syndrome and Systemic Sclerosis....
Experimental cell therapy delivers encouraging results for patients with rare, potentially fatal brain infection
July 27, 20262 min
In the largest study of its kind, a virus-specific T cell therapy achieved a response in more than half of treated patients with a rare and often deadly neurological condition caused by viral infection, according to Phase 2 study results. The investigational, off-the-shelf virus-specific T cells achieved an overall response rate of 56.8% in 37 patients with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), including 43.2% achieving complete viral clearance with stabilization or improvement of neurological symptoms. Patients...
Patients with advanced clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) who were treated with the CD70-targeted allogenic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, ALLO-316, experienced encouraging results with durable responses, according to results of the Phase 1a/b TRAVERSE clinical trial. This first-in-human study evaluated ALLO-316 in patients with metastatic ccRCC who had progression after treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors and tyrosine kinase inhibitors. The Phase 1a portion of the study established the recommended dose and lymphodepletion...
Researchers identified a six-gene signature in microscopic colorectal cancer (CRC) liver metastases that may help predict recurrence after treatment. These tiny, often undetectable tumor deposits could serve as a tissue-based marker of residual cancer cells, recurrence risk and chemotherapy resistance. The comprehensive spatial analyses of CRC metastases used advanced genomic technologies to uncover insights into how micrometastases evolve, evade the immune system and persist after treatment. The study was co-led by Dipen Maru, M.D., professor of Anatomical Pathology; Scott Kopetz, M.D., Ph.D.,...
A new study demonstrated that targeting mutant KRAS may offer a promising new treatment option for appendix cancer. Researchers led by John Paul Shen, M.D., assistant professor, Saikat Chowdhury, Ph.D., instructor, and Ichiaki Ito, Ph.D., research scientist, all of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, demonstrated that KRAS inhibitors significantly reduced tumor growth, blocked key cancer signaling pathways and triggered cancer cell death in advanced preclinical models of appendiceal adenocarcinoma. In a clinical cohort of 15 patients treated with a variety...