Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool that can accurately identify rare groups of biologically important cells from single-cell datasets, which often contain gene or protein expression data from thousands of cells. . This computational tool, called SCMER (Single-Cell Manifold presERving feature selection), can help researchers sort through the noise of complex datasets to study cells that would likely not be identifiable otherwise. . SCMER...

Rice University neurobiologist Rosa Uribe will be hitting the books for her latest study of the digestive system, but some of the pages in her books are a billion years old. Uribe, an assistant professor of biosciences, has won a five-year, $2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the enteric nervous system forms. If you didn’t realize you had an enteric nervous system, you’re not alone. “Most people don’t...

Implants that require a steady source of power but don’t need wires are an idea whose time has come. Now, for therapies that require multiple, coordinated stimulation implants, their timing has come as well. Rice University engineers who developed implants for electrical stimulation in patients with spinal cord injuries have advanced their technique to power and program multisite bio stimulators from a single transmitter. The Rice lab’s experiments showed an alternating magnetic field generated and controlled...

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a first-of-its-kind spatial atlas of early-stage lung cancer and surrounding normal lung tissue at single-cell resolution, providing a valuable resource for studying tumor development and identifying new therapeutic targets. The findings reveal a heterogeneous lung cancer ecosystem, with extensive interactions between cancer cells and the surrounding microenvironment that regulate early cancer development. By studying the crosstalk between the tumor and surrounding immune cells, researchers identified and...

COVID-19 vaccine antibodies remain highly active against the newly emerged California and New York variants of SARS-CoV-2, according to the latest research from a collaborative team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pfizer/BioNTech. The results provide new laboratory evidence to support mass immunization with the current, highly safe, and effective vaccines to end the COVID-19 pandemic. As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve in patients through accumulated mutations. Each mutation brings with it...

A new research study leveraging a database from the largest equal access health system in the US, the Department of Veteran Affairs, offers insight into the outcome of specific treatment patterns for advanced bladder cancer patients.  Lead author Dr. Stephen Williams of the University of Texas Medical Branch says it is one of the first comprehensive studies looking at both the outcomes and the costs of treating a potentially lethal and devastating type of bladder...

By analyzing tumors from more than 2,600 patients and from 38 cancer types, researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and fellow member institutions of the international Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium have characterized the extensive genetic diversity across cancer and within individual tumors.   The study found that 95% of the analyzed tumors had at least one subclone or genetically distinct group of tumor cells, and these subclones were often very diverse — even...

There are many ways to test municipal wastewater for signs of the virus that causes COVID-19, but scientists in Houston have determined theirs is the best yet. A study led by environmental engineer Lauren Stadler of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering with the aid of the City of Houston Health Department and Baylor College of Medicine compared five processes used by labs around the country to concentrate samples and find the virus in wastewater from six Houston plants....

A high rate of genetic mutations within a tumor, known as high tumor mutation burden (TMB), was only useful for predicting clinical responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors in a subset of cancer types, according to a new study led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.   The findings suggest that TMB status may not be reliably used as a universal biomarker for predicting immunotherapy response. While TMB status was capable of successfully predicting response to...

A team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) focused on drug addiction research have pioneered a new way to study frustration as a factor in substance use disorders.   Traditional addiction research has focused on three aspects of substance use disorders: craving, impulsivity, or habit.  Scientists hypothesized that a fourth factor, frustration, could also lead to escalation of drug use and addiction.   The Psychopharmacology paper noted that research into the role of...