Every year, over 1.2 million people continue to be infected by HIV. Of these, about 160,000 are infants that contract the virus from their mother. Without treatment, a third of these infants die by their first birthday, and half of them do not make it to age 2. Thanks to programs that identify and treat HIV-infected mothers and children, the…
Among the 1.7 million patients implanted globally every year with heart defibrillators and pacemakers, postoperative infections are a major concern. Although studies have reported low infection rates with these devices – between 1 percent and 4 percent of patients – the consequences are profound in terms of death and injury. “Patients require a complete extraction of their device system when it becomes…
Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Nepom, who founded BRI’s Diabetes Research Program in the 1980’s, and who led BRI’s growth as a world-class research institute for 3 decades, now devotes his time to a laser-focused effort on getting experimental therapies to patients. As the leader of the Immune Tolerance Network—an international organization of scientific and clinical experts in immunological diseases—Jerry directs teams…
Emergency room doctors often have only a few minutes to determine which patients are in need of a blood transfusion. But currently doctors have no direct method to assess the health of one of the most critical component of the blood: platelets. These tiny blood cells play a huge role in helping blood clot after an injury. Now researchers at…
Vikram Jandhyala, the University of Washington’s vice provost for innovation and a key link between the UW and the Seattle region’s technology community, has died as a result of suicide, according to a statement this afternoon by Ana Mari Cauce, the University of Washington president. Jandhyala, 47, led the UW’s innovation center, CoMotion, for five years. Earlier this year, he announced that he…
The oral blood thinner Xarelto (rivaroxaban) significantly reduced blood clots for high-risk patients with cancer being treated in the outpatient setting, according to results from the CASSINI trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Blood clots are really common in cancer patients. They can happen before the diagnosis, they can actually lead to the diagnosis of cancer, but most commonly…
The study of a protein, critical in causing asthma, allergies and other diseases, has led scientists at Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI) to discover a new strategy for stopping breast cancer. BRI researchers Emma Kuan, PhD, and Steven Ziegler, PhD, have pinpointed how the protein, called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP), helps breast cancer tumors survive and grow. Even more significant,…
The Aga Khan University and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center this week expressed their shared commitment in working together to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer and related diseases in low- and middle-income countries. President Firoz Rasul of Aga Khan University and President and Director of Fred Hutch, Dr. Gary Gilliland, signed a memorandum of understanding which aims to foster joint international scientific…
A first-of-its-kind nanoparticle vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus has been designed in an international research effort. RSV is second only to malaria as a cause of infant mortality worldwide. The new vaccine elicits potent neutralizing antibodies against RSV in both mice and monkeys. The animal research findings, reported March 7 in the journal Cell, pave the way for human clinical trials.…
Have you ever jumped in fear, and then a split second later realized that a spider (or a spider-shaped shadow) was at the edge of your vision? Your brain enables different kinds of responses to visual information. There’s the conscious response to what you see, which is what allows you to read and understand words, check the weather through a…