By Ayomide Isola-Gbenla, BS, Monisha Arya MD, MPH, and K. Viswanath PhD.   As Harris County healthcare organizations adhere to social distancing and employ telemedicine during this COVID-19 crisis, we are worried that many residents in our community will be left out. While poverty and lack of education are known to limit healthcare access, not having access to communication technologies such as computers and internet is underappreciated as a health determinant. Ignoring these factors during...

The plans for Rice University’s ApolloBVM, an open-source emergency ventilator design that could help patients in treatment for COVID-19, are now online and freely available to everyone in the world. The project first developed by students as a senior design project in 2019 has been brought up to medical grade by Rice engineers and one student, with the help of Texas Medical Center doctors. The device costs less than $300 in parts and can squeeze a common bag...

A one-year follow-up study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed a majority of patients with mantle cell lymphoma resistant to prior therapies may benefit from treatment with CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.   The multi-center, 20-site, Phase II ZUMA-2 study reported that 93% of patients responded to the CAR T-cell therapy KTE-X19, with 67% achieving a complete response. At a median one year-follow up, 57% of patients were in complete remission, and...

Comprehensive profiling of tumor samples taken from patients with osteosarcoma shows that multiple factors contribute to the traditionally poor responses observed from treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors, according to new research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.   The study found that poor infiltration of the tumor by immune cells, low activity from available T cells, a lack of immune-stimulating neoantigens, and multiple immune-suppressing pathways all combine to dampen responses to immunotherapy.   “This study is important...

Molecule-sized drills do the damage they are designed to do. That’s bad news for disease. Scientists at Rice University, Biola University and the Texas A&M Health Science Center have further validation that their molecular motors, light-activated rotors that spin up to 3 million times per second, can target diseased cells and kill them in minutes.   The team led by Biola molecular biochemist Richard Gunasekera and Rice chemist James Tour showed their motors are highly effective at destroying cells...

More than 2.5 million people in the United States alone experience a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, each year. Some of these people are plagued by a seemingly unrelated cascade of health issues for years after their head injury, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, memory issues, and sleep disturbances.   A collaborative team, led by Dr. Randall Urban, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston’s Chief Research Officer and Professor of Endocrinology, has spent the past 20...

The Rice University team led by Antonios Mikos says otherwise with its development of a groovy method to seed sophisticated, 3D-printed tissue-engineering scaffolds with living cells to help heal injuries.   The researchers are literally carving grooves into plastic threads used to build the scaffolds. The grooves are then seeded with cells or other bioactive agents that encourage the growth of new tissue.   The strategy protects cells from the heat and shear stresses that would likely...

A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that circulating tumor cells (CTCs), a form of liquid biopsy, was independently associated with melanoma relapse, suggesting CTC assessment may be useful in identifying patients at risk for relapse who could benefit from more aggressive therapy following primary treatment.   Although CTCs can be detected in melanoma patients, there is limited data regarding their significance in stage III (node-positive) disease. This prospective study was based on earlier research that found...

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor. Their findings identify macrophages that express high levels of CD73, a surface enzyme that’s a vital piece of an immunosuppressive molecular pathway. The strong presence of the CD73 macrophages was unique to glioblastoma among five tumor...

Hydrogels for healing, synthesized from the molecules up by Rice University bioengineers, are a few steps closer to the clinic. Rice researchers and collaborators at Texas Heart Institute (THI) have established a baseline set of injectable hydrogels that promise to help heal wounds, deliver drugs, and treat cancer. Critically, they’ve analyzed how the chemically distinct hydrogels provoke the body’s inflammatory response — or not.   Hydrogels developed at Rice are designed to be injectable and create a...