Feature Channels: Blood

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Blood can typically be stored for only six weeks after donation, but a potential solution attempts to dry blood by using a sugar-based preservative. New work in ultrasound technology looks to provide a path to inserting these sugars into human red blood cells, allowing the molecule trehalose to enter the cells and prevent their degradation when dried for preservation. The researchers discuss their work in this week’s Biomicrofluidics.

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Rutgers physicians and University Hospital are leading the way in using blood plasma from patients who recovered from COVID-19 to treat new patients who are severely ill with COVID-19 infections.

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Yale Cancer Center announces the appointments of Thomas Prebet, M.D., Ph.D., as Disease Aligned Research Team (DART) Leader for Myeloid Malignancies and Amer Zeidan, MBBS, as Director of the Hematology Early Therapeutics Program.

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A consortium of California scientists from government, academia and business today published an initial manuscript describing a novel approach to prepare convalescent plasma for COVID-19 patients in BioRxiv.

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Penn State Health has enrolled its first COVID-19 patient into an experimental treatment program called convalescent plasma therapy.

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A new study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai suggests that blood clots, especially in the lungs, may play a role in severe cases of COVID-19.

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A blood test may be able to detect the most common form of pancreatic cancer while it is still in its early stages while also helping doctors accurately stage a patient’s disease and guide them to the appropriate treatment.

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A new review suggests that higher-than-normal levels of an enzyme involved in blood clot prevention may be a common risk factor for developing COVID-19—a respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2—in some populations. The review is published in Physiological Reviews.

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Blood pressure readings taken from neuroscience intensive care unit (NSICU) patients had marked differences between opposite sides of the body and different anatomical sites in each individual

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Roswell Park will offer plasma from the donated blood of healthy individuals who have had COVID-19 but have now fully recovered to patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 through an expanded access program authorized by the U.S. FDA.

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Bioengineers have created a blood-drawing robot that performed as well or better than technicians. The device could increase blood draw success from difficult- to-find veins and allow healthcare workers more time to treat patients.

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As scientists race to develop and test new treatments for COVID-19, Dana-Farber’s Wayne Marasco, MD, PhD, and his lab team are bringing one of the world’s most formidable resources to the effort: a “library” of 27 billion human antibodies against viruses, bacteria, and other bodily invaders.The collection, created by Marasco and his associates in 1997 using blood samples from more than 57 Dana-Farber staff, has already had an illustrious history in the quest to tame viral disease outbreaks.

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The FDA’s announcement Friday to approve convalescent serum therapy as a large-scale clinical trial opened the door for more patients to receive the potentially life-saving gift of a donor’s plasma.

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Mayo Clinic will be the lead institution providing coordinated access to investigational convalescent plasma for hospitalized patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19, or those at high risk of progression to severe or life-threatening disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the designation on Friday, April 3.

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The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has awarded Case Western Reserve University up to $3.7 million to assess emerging genome-editing based therapies being tested for curing sickle cell disease (SCD) at leading U.S research universities and hospitals. SCD is the most well-known among a group of inherited blood disorders, affecting about 100,000 people in the United States and about 20 million worldwide, according to a 2018 National Institutes of Health (NIH) statement announcing the NHLBI Cure Sickle Cell Initiative.

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Vaccine expert working on developing covid-19 vaccine, sees major differences between Covid-19 and SARS

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In a study involving thousands of participants, a new blood test detected more than 50 types of cancer as well as their location within the body with a high degree of accuracy, according to an international team of researchers led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic.

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Houston Methodist received FDA approval Saturday to become the first academic medical center in the nation to transfuse donated plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient into a critically ill patient. This treatment was fast-tracked to the bedside over the weekend as the death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic soared to more than 2,000 people across the United States, with more than 100,000 Americans sick from the virus.

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• Two studies examine potential benefits of blood pressure monitoring outside of doctors’ offices for patients with kidney disease.

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An expert team of researchers and clinicians have been working together to design, validate, and implement an “end-to-end” clinical pathology laboratory solution that will allow for the testing of approximately several hundred people per day in order to rapidly diagnose and help guide the selection of treatment and monitor disease course.

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Penn Medicine research shows genetically engineering macrophages – an immune cell that eats invaders in the body – could be the key to unlocking cellular therapies that effectively target solid tumors

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Children with aggressive blood cancers have differences — not just in the DNA code of their blood cells — but also in the heavily twisted protein superstructure that controls access to genes.

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Engineers have created a tiny device that can rapidly detect harmful bacteria in blood, allowing health care professionals to pinpoint the cause of potentially deadly infections and fight them with drugs. The Rutgers coauthored study, led by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, is published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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• Study results call into question the utility of testing blood pressure load—the proportion of elevated blood pressure readings detected over 24 hours—for diagnosing hypertension in children.

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The researchers have already confirmed their discovery in human tissue samples and used it to reverse high blood pressure in lab mice.

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New research into why some people’s blood doesn’t clot well identified defects in the platelet-making process, where mutant cells aren’t behaving properly. Because these cells have a variety of different direction and movement issues, patients will need personalized drug therapies and treatments to treat patient-specific mutations.

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Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have created a computer program for scientists at no charge that lets users readily quantify the structural and functional changes in the blood flow networks feeding tumors.

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Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel treatment for sepsis – one of the leading causes of hospital death – that enhances the body’s bacteria-capturing neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) so that they more effectively capture infectious bacteria, resist degradation, and improve sepsis outcomes and survival.

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Researchers have found that genetically defined subpopulations of leukemia cells present at diagnosis have distinct characteristics that lead to relapse.

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Mount Sinai researchers have discovered a way to enhance the potency of blood-forming stem cells, potentially opening the door to a new approach for bone marrow transplantation.

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New research shows brain imaging may be able to predict when a blood test known as a liquid biopsy would or would not produce clinically actionable information

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A new program launched by the Department of Defense could be the answer to blood shortages on the battlefield, other remote locations, and in hospitals. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences' 4D Bio3 On-Demand Blood Program, or 4D Bio3 Blood, has developed highly efficient protocols and technology to generate red blood cells from stem cells. A key part of this technology is large-scale cell expansion at low cost, producing sufficient red blood cells for treatment in trauma care. This technology is also being adapted to create neutrophils, ultimately allowing for whole blood transfusion using these methods in the future.

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The National Institutes of Health has launched a $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge (TAC) to spur the design and development of non-invasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact. The Challenge is focused on sickle cell disease, malaria and anemia and is led by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).

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Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with higher measures of tumor mutations that show up in a blood test generally have a better clinical response to PD-1-based immunotherapy treatments than patients with a lower measure of mutations.

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Harvard researchers have discovered a new mechanism for how the brain and its arteries communicate to supply blood to areas of heightened neural activity. The findings enable new avenues of study into the role of this process in neurological diseases.

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Sepsis causes nearly 270,000 deaths in the United States each year. Find out how big data approaches are helping clinicians catch it sooner, treat it better, and help survivors cope with long-term effects.

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University of Kentucky professor Ann Stowe’s research may pave the way to understanding and improving how the brain recovers from stroke.

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The old story of a farmer trying to get a stubborn mule to pull a wagon by dangling a carrot in front of its nose, or hitting its rump with a stick, may not seem to have much to do with the practice of medicine. But a new study suggests that when it comes to making the best use of health care dollars, it will take a combination of carrots and sticks to move things forward.

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Louise D. McCullough, MD, PhD, a physician-scientist at UTHealth is a recipient of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) prestigious $1 million Merit Award to investigate whether the maternal microbiome influences stroke risk in offspring.

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Yvonne Chen engineers immune cells to target their most evasive enemy: cancer. New cancer immunotherapies generate immune cells that are effective killers of blood cancers, but they have a hard time with solid tumors.

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Genes are like instructions, but with options for building more than one thing. Daniel Larson, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, studies this gene “splicing” process, which happens in normal cells and goes awry in blood cancers like leukemia.

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Like finding a needle in a haystack, Liviu Movileanu can find a single molecule in blood.

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Consumption of cocoa may improve walking performance for patients with peripheral artery disease, according to the results of a small, preliminary, phase II research trial published today in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation Research.

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A novel research study by UC San Diego researchers will determine whether testing stored blood drops, recorded at birth, for 1,000 different molecules and chemicals can help predict autism risk years before symptoms would likely appear.

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Researchers have discovered that endothelial cells have unique genetic signatures based on their location in the body.