Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch have found SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the testes of infected hamsters. The findings could help explain symptoms that some men with COVID-19 have reported and have important implications for men’s health. As the pandemic goes on, clinicians are finding that COVID-19 affects more than just the lungs. Some patients have reported testicular pain and some reports have shown decreases in testosterone, a key hormone...

Surgeons who pioneered an in-utero procedure that has improved the outcomes of children with spina bifida, and their mothers who underwent the fetal surgery, performed the 100th surgery of its kind Tuesday at Texas Children’s Fetal Center. Drs. Michael Belfort, OB/GYN-in-Chief at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women, and William Whitehead, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children’s, performed the first successful two-port fetoscopic surgery for spina bifida in the world back in 2014, a technique which...

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Hummingbird Bioscience announced the launch of a multi-year strategic research collaboration to investigate and evaluate HMBD-002, Hummingbird’s VISTA antagonist antibody. Under the agreement, MD Anderson and Hummingbird will collaborate on the design and execution of clinical and translational research studies to better understand how HMBD-002 modulates the anti-tumor immune response, both as a monotherapy and in combination with other checkpoint inhibitors. Working with MD Anderson’s immunotherapy...

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating transformation in healthcare systems across the globe, but obstacles including workforce stability, provider incentivization, and innovation barriers could slow progress, according to 200 healthcare leaders from around the world. Chief Executives from some of the world’s leading public and private healthcare providers in eight geographies were interviewed for KPMG’s first-ever Global Healthcare CEO Future Pulse. The report’s breadth and scale offer insights into how healthcare leaders overseeing hospitals, health systems,...

. Results from the multi-cohort Phase I/II ARROW clinical trial, conducted by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers, showed that a once-daily dose of pralsetinib, a highly selective RET inhibitor, was safe and effective in treating patients with advanced RET fusion-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and RET-altered thyroid cancer. . “Targeted therapies have dramatically improved care for patients with NSCLC and thyroid cancer driven by oncogenes, and the rapid clinical translation of selective RET inhibitor pralsetinib marks another milestone in a...

.A new strategy to reduce the side effects suffered by patients undergoing treatment for head and neck cancers now has the support of the National Institutes of Health.  . Andrew Schaefer, the Noah Harding Chair and a professor of computational and applied mathematics and computer science at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, won a prestigious four-year R01 grant for $1.2 million to develop a personalized approach to adaptive radiation therapy (ART) for head and neck cancers.  . The goal of...

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...