Category Health/Medical

It took 13 years and one billion dollars to sequence the human genome, an enormous scientific undertaking that launched a new era of medicine. With today’s advances in sequencing technology, that same task would have only taken about a day at a fraction of the cost. Tomorrow’s tech could whittle that down to mere seconds.

Nanopore-based DNA sequencing is a third generation technology that has the potential to further transform health care by providing rapid diagnostics of illnesses and personalizing medicine. The more efficient the method, the better...

Many people don’t realize that the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi residing within the gastrointestinal tract — collectively called the gut microbiome — are connected to overall health, and specifically to cancer.

Manipulating the gut microbiome to produce “beneficial” commensal microbes, which protect the host from pathogens and can boost immune responses, among other things, could potentially help patients respond better to cancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy.

To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new dietary fiber formulation that improves the potency of immunotherapies against cancer by modulating the gut microbiome...

Patients will be able to receive confirmed diagnosis at the doctor’s office. The idea of visiting the doctor’s office with symptoms of an illness and leaving with a scientifically confirmed diagnosis is much closer to reality because of new technology developed by researchers at McMaster University.

Engineering, biochemistry and medical researchers from across campus have combined their skills to create a handheld rapid test for bacterial infections that can produce accurate, reliable results in less than an hour, eliminating the need to send samples to a lab.

Their proof-of-concept research, published today in the journal Nature Chemistry, specifically describes the test’s effectiveness in diagnosing urinary tract infections from real clinical samples...

A typical Western high-fat diet can increase the risk of painful disorders common in people with conditions such as diabetes or obesity, according to a groundbreaking paper authored by a team led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, also referred to as UT Health San Antonio.

Moreover, changes in diet may significantly reduce or even reverse pain from conditions causing either inflammatory pain — such as arthritis, trauma or surgery — or neuropathic pain, such as diabetes. The novel finding could help treat chronic-pain patients by simply altering diet or developing drugs that block release of certain fatty acids in the body.

The paper, more than five years in the making, was published in the June edition of the journal Nature Metabolism by a collabora...