A team of physicians, environmental scientists and students at the University of Texas Medical Branch have completed a multi-year study of cancer rates among individuals living in close proximity to oil refineries and have found statistically significant increases in several cancers among those living nearest to these facilities. The study, Proximity to Oil Refineries and Risk of Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis, was led by Dr. Stephen B. Williams, Chief of Urology and a tenured professor of...

Researchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new method to isolate specific cells, and in the process found a more robust fluorescent protein. Both the platform and the protein could be highly useful to synthetic biologists and biomedical researchers. They often need to single out cells with specific visual phenotypes like shape or activity determined by their genetic or epigenetic makeup or their developmental history. Rice graduate student Jihwan (James) Lee and François...

A multidisciplinary team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has shown a dominant mutation D614G of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enhances viral replication in the upper respiratory airway, which may contribute to the increased transmission of COVID-19. This finding is important in understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 as well as in the development of vaccines and therapeutic antibodies. “After the emergence of COVID-19, a mutation of D614G appeared in viral spike protein, the molecule that...

Through large-scale profiling of protein changes in response to drug treatments in cancer cell lines, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have generated a valuable resource to aid in predicting drug sensitivity, to understand therapeutic resistance mechanisms, and to identify optimal combination treatment strategies. Their findings include expression changes in more than 200 clinically relevant proteins across more than 300 cell lines after treatment with 168 different compounds, making it the...

When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do. With a new deep learning-based technique created at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering, they may soon get a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body. The Rice lab of computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has introduced Metabolite Translator, a computational tool that predicts metabolites, the...

Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered SARS-CoV-2 proteins that suppress the body’s immune response, thereby enabling infection and transmission of the disease. The findings are paramount to understanding the biology of COVID-19 and to developing new vaccines against the disease. “The outcome of any infection is determined by pathogen amplification and immune response inside our body. In the case of COVID-19 patients, it is important to understand how SARS-CoV-2...

A new study from researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has discovered that mutations found in cancers do not accumulate randomly, but are found in distinct patterns that vary based on the three-dimensional organization of the genome in the cell as well as the underlying factors causing the mutations. Mutations caused by external factors, such as ultraviolet light or tobacco smoke, led to mutations in different regions than internal factors, such...

Rice University engineers will gain a better understanding of brain activity over time with the support of the National Institutes of Health. The agency has awarded a four-year grant of $4.15 million to Chong Xie of the Brown School of Engineering’s Neuroengineering Initiative to maximize the use of devices based on the flexible nanoelectronic thread (NET) he has developed. The information they gather could be critical to future treatment of neurological disease. The biocompatible probes have the unique ability to stably...

A new study by researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston suggests that people with substance use disorders may be particularly vulnerable to the adverse respiratory effects of COVID-19, especially those using drugs that impair the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. As COVID-19 continues to spread worldwide, health care systems are working to identify patients at high risk of becoming infected with and suffering from complications of the disease. People with substance use disorder are likely to be at...

Results from a Phase II trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center suggest that a combination of ipilimumab (anti-CTLA-4) plus nivolumab (anti-PD-1) can generate durable responses in a subset of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), an “immune-cold” cancer that does not typically respond well to immunotherapy. In a cohort of patients without previous chemotherapy treatment, the overall response rate (ORR) was 25% and median overall survival (OS) was 19 months. In a...