Archive for the ‘Philadelphia Medical Breakthroughs’ Category

CURBING DEPRESSION IN VISION-LOSS PATIENTS

For years, a local doctor has studied depression in patients with macular degeneration. Now he says he's found a way to stop it in its tracks.

Posted by Sandy Hingston on 5/2/2012 at 11:42AM | No Comments

It’s only natural for somebody who suddenly loses vision to become depressed, right? I mean, wouldn’t you?

Not if Barry Rovner, a geriatric psychiatrist at Wills Eye Hospital, has his way. “As you get older, you lose function of all sorts—your hearing, your sight, how fast you run, how strong you are,” he says. “These are natural changes, and they’re tolerated pretty well.” But with macular degeneration, a major cause of vision loss in older adults—it affects 10 percent of all those ages 66 to 74 and 30 percent of those 75 to 85—disability doesn’t come on gradually: “Suddenly—bam! You’re substantially visually impaired,” says Rovner. “You can’t read, you can’t drive, you can’t put on makeup, you can’t take care of your grandkids.” Your thinking becomes catastrophic; you’re convinced your life is over. And that sort of thinking, says Rovner, leads to depression.

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HOW A COLD VIRUS CAN FIGHT CANCER

Researchers at Penn are doing some seriously cool work to battle early-stage mesothelioma.

Posted by Emily Leaman on 12/15/2011 at 2:46PM | 2 Comments

Researchers at Penn Medicine announced this week some promising results from a small clinical trial for a new cancer treatment using a modified cold virus to fight mesothelioma, a deadly cancer of the lungs. The treatment, called immuno-gene therapy, entails injecting patients with a small amount of adenovirus, a cold virus—just enough to trigger an immune response. Then, the patient’s own immune defenses take over and start destroying cancer cells.

The results of their study, which track the progress of a handful patients with mesothelioma at various stages of the disease, are in today’s issue of American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Of the nine patients enrolled in the study, antibody responses mounted against the tumors were seen in almost all of them—including the advance-stage ones, who, typically, have few viable treatment options available. What’s more, the disease either stabilized or regressed in five patients, and no major side effects from the therapy were observed.

This is pretty big news for anyone who has—or knows someone who has—mesothelioma. The Mayo Clinic characterizes it as an “aggressive and deadly” cancer, usually caused by asbestos exposure. There’s no known cure, and treatments are aimed mainly at making patients as comfortable as possible.

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CHOP OPENS NEW GENOME CENTER

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has partnered with the world's largest genomic institute to open a pediatric genome center.

Posted by Emily Leaman on 11/11/2011 at 3:20PM | No Comments

Earlier this week, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced a partnership with the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) on its new Joint Genome Center, which became fully operational last month. Through the partnership, the center will focus sequencing genes responsible for pediatric diseases, in hopes of better understanding how they work and forging new treatment options.

Headquartered in Beijing since 1999, BGI has partnered with institutions—hospitals, colleges, corporations—around the world on other sequencing projects. The CHOP partnership is the institute’s latest.

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PHILLY’S FIRST HAND TRANSPLANT SURGERY PERFORMED AT PENN (VIDEO)

The University of Pennsylvania joins the ranks of just six institutions in the world to perform a hand transplant surgery.

Posted by Emily Leaman on 11/1/2011 at 12:27PM | No Comments

Doctors perform the delicate hand transplant surgery. Image courtesy of Penn Medicine

A team of 30 doctors and nurses performed the region’s first hand transplant surgery in September, the University of Pennsylvania announced at a press conference earlier this morning. The surgery was part of the new Penn Hand Transplant Program. And the patient, a female quadruple amputee, received not one, but two new hands as part of the bilateral transplant procedure.

The patient has yet to be identified—she wants more time to recover in therapy before she talks about her experience—but what we do know is that the surgery took 11½ hours to complete. It’s a super complex and delicate procedure, which involves attaching the hands and forearms from a donor and connecting everything from bone and blood vessels to nerves and muscles. The bones come together with plates and screws, and muscles and tendons have to be repaired individually once blood flow is restored to the limbs. The Penn team included 12 surgeons, three anesthesiologists and 15 nurses.

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FOX CHASE DOC UNCOVERS GENETIC LINK FOR MESOTHELIOMA

A new study finds that a gene mutation makes people more susceptible to the aggressive cancer

Posted by Emily Leaman on 8/29/2011 at 2:28PM | 1 Comment

The discovery could help doctors diagnose mesothelioma earlier.

Local scientists have uncovered a genetic link to mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer usually found in the lungs that kills 3,000 people in the U.S. each year.

Dr. Joseph Testa of Philly’s Fox Chase Cancer Center teamed up with a researcher at the University of Hawaii to lead a study on the mutation of a gene called BAP1. They found that carriers of the mutated gene are particularly susceptible to mesothelioma, as well as a rare melanoma of the eye.

Mesothelioma is usually associated with exposure to asbestos. The cancer’s symptoms are vague during its earliest stages, so cases often go undiagnosed until stage 3 or 4—far too late in the game to operate. Patients usually die within six to nine months of diagnosis.

The findings could help doctors screen for individuals who are at particularly high risk for mesothelioma. “A genetic test could help doctors catch the disease earlier on, when it might still be treatable,” says Testa. Understanding the BAP1 gene could also lead to more targeted therapies for treatment.

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NEW HOPE FOR A CANCER CURE

Penn researchers may have found a way to wipe out malignant tumors

Posted by Kathryn Siegel on 8/17/2011 at 4:12PM | 1 Comment

Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine make a major breakthrough

In the latest breakthrough in the search for a cure for cancer, researchers at UPenn’s Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine have proven the success of so-called “gene transfer therapy.”

Three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia—a slow-progressing cancer of the bone and bone marrow—took part in the treatment trial, spearheaded by Drs. David Porter and Carl June. People with this form of cancer usually have very few treatment options and must resort to a bone-marrow transplant, a procedure that carries a 50-percent chance at a cure against a 20-percent mortality risk.

June and Porter went a different route. They removed some of the patients’ T cells, key disease-fighting players in the immune system, and encoded them with a protein that programs them to attack tumor cells. The genetically modified T cells were then reintroduced to the patients’ bodies after chemotherapy—and they delivered on their promise.

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