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At a glance: BioPlex network identifies protein interaction partners for more than 5,800 protein-coding genes, representing more than a quarter of the human genome. The network maps over 56,000 unique protein-to-protein interactions among nearly 11,000 proteins, significantly expanding coverage of the human interactome. 87 percent of identified interactions were previously undescribed. BioPlex serves as “social network,” providing functional insights into protein communities involving many areas of biology, from development to disease.

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At a glance: Hospitalized patients have a slightly higher risk of dying when treated by older hospitalists—internal medicine specialists who oversee the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Physician age made no difference in patient mortality rates for doctors who treated large numbers of patients. The results suggest the critical importance of continuing medical education throughout the span of a physician’s professional career. Age played no role in patient readmission rates but older physicians were slightly more likely to incur greater treatment costs.

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While the NFL’s player health policies and practices are robust in some areas, there are opportunities for improvement in others, according to the findings of a newly released report by researchers at The Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School.

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At a glance: · New study reveals that blood-brain barrier function relies on the balance between omega-3 fatty acids and other lipids in cells that line blood vessels in the central nervous system. · This lipid make-up keeps the barrier closed by inhibiting the formation of vesicles that shuttle molecules across cells, a process known as transcytosis. · Low levels of vesicles are maintained by the lipid transport protein Mfsd2a. · Disrupting Mfsd2a may be a strategy for opening the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs into the brain.

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The Harvard Medical School-based Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd.org) and the Sanford Program for the Midwest Initiative in Science Exploration (PROMISE) at Sanford Research have teamed to bring the latest developments in genetics into classrooms and communities in Massachusetts and South Dakota.

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At a glance: A newly published analysis shows the use of telemedicine to diagnose, treat and counsel rural patients with mental health disorders rose dramatically between 2004 and 2014. The research found strikingly uneven distribution across states, with four states having no telemedicine visits at all. Overall use of telemedicine for mental health care remains quite low, at 1.5 percent, underscoring the need to explore ways to expand access to such critical services.

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At a glance: People who suffer heart attacks and cardiac arrests in the vicinity of major marathons are more likely to die within a month. The bleaker survival odds are linked to delays in transportation to nearby hospitals. The delays are believed to stem from widespread road closures within the radius of the race. The study findings underscore the need for citywide strategies that ensure rapid transport for medical emergencies in the vicinity of major public events.

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HMS launches free online course to educate clinicians, the public

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At a glance: • Patients with common conditions such as back pain, headache and upper respiratory infections are more likely to get tests and services that are unnecessary or of little diagnostic and therapeutic benefit—so-called low-value care—if they visit hospital-based primary care practices instead of community-based ones. • Practice location, rather than practice ownership, appears to be the driving factor behind the disparity. • Low-value care was particularly common among patients who saw someone other than their primary care physician at a hospital-based primary care practice.

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Harvard Medical School to host top journalists for educational fellowships

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HMX Fundamentals offers four rigorous courses in foundational subjects, including physiology, immunology, biochemistry and genetics. The program is suited for future clinicians and scientifically curious adults seeking in-depth medical knowledge. The program is accepting applications through May 30 for its inaugural summer course.

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The body’s ability to repair DNA damage declines with age, which causes gradual cell demise, overall bodily degeneration and greater susceptibility to cancer.

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At a glance: Hospitalized patients treated by higher-spending physicians do not have better outcomes than patients treated by lower-spending physicians. Health care spending varies more across individual physicians than across hospitals. While other studies have examined differences in spending and patient outcomes across geographic regions and across hospitals, this is the first study to analyze the link between spending patterns of individual physicians within the same hospital and patient outcomes.

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Local study suggests urban mobile clinics may help boost patient participation, engagement in care

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David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been named co-recipient of the 2017 Dan David Prize in archaeology and natural sciences.

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Harvard Medical School researchers have successfully “listened in” on the crosstalk between gut microbes and the immune system.

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At a glance: New research shows great variation among clinicians’ opioid prescribing practices and links physician prescription patterns to patients’ risk for subsequent long-term opioid use. Being treated by an emergency room physician who prescribes opioids more frequently increases a patient’s risk of long-term opioid use and other adverse outcomes. The results suggest that differences in clinicians’ prescribing habits may be helping to fuel the opioid epidemic sweeping the United States.

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Clinical decision-making and treatment choice is a complex cognitive process influenced by multiple variables.

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Sleep—one of the most basic, yet most mystifying processes of the human body—has confounded physicians, scientists and evolutionary biologists for centuries.

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• Harvard Medical School scientists and colleagues from the Massachusetts General Hospital have partly restored hearing in mice with a genetic form of deafness. • Scientists altered a common virus, enhancing its ability to enter hair cells in the inner ear that are critical for hearing and to deliver a missing gene essential for hearing and balance. • The new approach overcomes a longstanding barrier to gene therapy for inherited and acquired deafness.

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Harvard Medical School’s Media Fellowship program, now entering its 20th year, is accepting applications for its spring 2017 sessions. The fellowships bring together top health and science journalists and preeminent researchers and physician-scientists for a weeklong educational immersion on the HMS campus in Boston.

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Nerve-damaging protein particles called prions have long been known to exist in mammals. Now, in a surprising discovery, investigators from Harvard Medical School report they have found evidence that bacteria can also make prions. Prions—self-propagating clumps of misfolded protein—have been identified as the cause of several rare but universally fatal neurodegenerative conditions, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as mad cow disease.

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Alternative payment model boosts quality of care for low-income patients

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In-vitro gametogenesis is an experimental technique that allows scientists to grow embryos in a lab by reprograming adult cells to become sperm and egg cells.

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Pop culture icons can influence our fashion choices, dietary habits and brand preferences, but can celebrities also influence our medical decisions?

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Rhabdoid tumors are among the most recalcitrant childhood cancers, and scientists have long sought ways to understand what drives their resilience and makes them impervious to treatment. Now researchers from Harvard Medical School, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and elsewhere have uncovered a molecular chain of events that interferes with a key mechanism that regulates cell behavior and controls tumor formation.

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Patients who choose primary care doctors with low office visit prices can rack up considerable savings on overall health care costs according to new research from Harvard Medical School. The report, published Dec. 5 in the December issue of the journal Health Affairs, suggests that low office visit costs may be a reliable indicator of what a patient will pay for a wide range of services and procedures.

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Stephen Elledge, the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, has been named a 2017 recipient of the Breakthrough Prize, which recognizes paradigm-shifting discoveries in the life sciences, physics and mathematics.  Elledge is being honored for his wide-ranging contributions across multiple fields in biology.

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Slight gender variations in attention scores have been well documented, but a new study from Harvard Medical School suggests that these minor gaps widen significantly in places with lower gender equality. The findings, published Nov. 1 in PLOS One, reveal that gender variations in performance of tasks that require participants to exercise sustained attention control are closely tied to gender equality by country.

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A newly released on analysis performed over two years by researchers at Harvard Law School outlines key recommendations to improve structural, ethical and legal factors that affect the health of NFL players

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A gene that regulates bone growth and muscle metabolism in mammals may take on an additional role as a promoter of brain maturation, cognition and learning in human and nonhuman primates, according to a new study led by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School.

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Working with dot-counting mice running through a virtual-reality maze, scientists from Harvard Medical School have found that in order to navigate space rodent brains rely on a cascade of neural signals that culminate in a single decision that prompts the animal to choose one direction over another.

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Court orders demanding death row inmates to provide “specific, detailed and concrete alternatives” to a state’s lethal injection protocol compel those inmates to produce evidence that is impossible to obtain without forcing physicians and other clinicians to violate their medical ethics, according to Harvard bioethicists and legal experts. Such orders, therefore, the experts argue, pose an insurmountable hurdle for inmates seeking alternative methods of execution.

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Researchers in the laboratory of George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, are working to produce the most modified bacterial genome to date. The researchers believe the method they developed will help others who are trying to make many edits at once to any organism’s genome. Below is a Q&A with the scientists, Nili Ostrov and Matthieu Landon.

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Hundreds of millions of people rely on Internet or app-based symptom checkers to help make sense of symptoms or self-diagnose diseases. The first direct comparison shows human doctors outperform digital ones in diagnostic accuracy.

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At a glance: • Marrying advanced math with standard blood-sugar tests, Harvard Medical School scientists have devised a more accurate way to measure three-month average blood sugar levels in people with diabetes. • The new model offers a more precise alternative to the current gold-standard test by accounting for the age of a person’s red blood cells. • Average blood sugar is the best predictor of long-term diabetes complications and the cornerstone of disease management. • In addition to assessing disease status, measuring a person’s average blood sugar can help detect new-onset diabetes and identify people on the cusp of developing it.

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Genomic analysis of 142 ethnic groups spanning the range of human diversity has yielded insights into modern human variation and ancient population dynamics The effort has resulted in the largest whole-genome data set of under- and unstudied populations and is accessible to scientists worldwide The results enrich the catalog of population-specific genetic variants linked to disease and may help inform the development of precision-targeted diagnostic tests and treatments

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Most cancers have a sweet tooth but—mysteriously—some tumors prefer fat over sugar. Now, a study from Harvard Medical School reveals how these cancers develop their appetite for fat.

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Harvard Medical School has launched Library of Evidence, a free, publicly accessible online resource to help clinicians choose the most appropriate imaging tests based on the best available research evidence. • The resource is designed to avert unnecessary imaging and contain rising health care costs associated with this practice. • The Library debuts on the eve of a new federal law that mandates the use of evidence-based decision-support systems by clinicians caring for federally insured patients. • Over time, the Library will expand to include other domains of clinical decision-making, such as choosing appropriate medications or ordering other tests and procedures.

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Scientists from Harvard Medical School have identified a key instigator of nerve cell damage in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disorder.

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Scientists from Harvard Medical School have identified a key instigator of nerve cell damage in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disorder.  Researchers say the findings of their study, published Aug. 5 in the journal Science, may lead to new therapies to halt the progression of the uniformly fatal disease that affects more than 30,000 Americans.

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Neuroscientists have long known that brain cells communicate with each other through the release of tiny bubbles packed with neurotransmitters—a fleet of vessels docked along neuronal ends ready to launch when a trigger arrives. Now, a study conducted in mice by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School reveals that dismantling the docking stations that house these signal-carrying vessels does not fully disrupt signal transmission between cells.

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Genetic testing has greatly improved physicians’ ability to detect potentially lethal heart anomalies among asymptomatic family members of people who suffer cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death. But a study from Harvard Medical School published in the Aug. 18 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine shows that over the last decade these lifesaving tools may have disproportionately misdiagnosed one cardiac condition — hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) – in black Americans.

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Harvard Medical School scientists have identified a new family of proteins that virtually all bacteria use to build and maintain their cell walls. The discovery of a second set of cell wall synthesizers can help pave the way for much-needed therapies that target the cell wall as a way to kill harmful bacteria, said study leaders David Rudner and Thomas Bernhardt.

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Researchers don’t yet know how immature egg cells, or oocytes, survive and protect their contents while they lie dormant for years in a woman’s ovaries, waiting for hormonal signals that ready them for fertilization. Cell biologist Elvan Boke, a postdoctoral researcher in the Mitchison lab at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues suspect clues might lie in Balbiani bodies.

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Conducting the first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East, an international team led by Harvard Medical School has illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics of the world’s first farmers.

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We can thank neurons in the brain’s cerebral cortex for the rich representation of the world we “see.” In response to sensory stimuli—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch—neurons fire electrical spikes that collectively make up our brain’s model of the world. Get more HMS news here To help construct that world, individual neurons are so specialized that they fire in response to specific external inputs.

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Early studies have suggested that paying doctors bonuses for meeting targets for certain health care measures would lead to improved health outcomes for patients, but the findings were not repeated in later, more rigorous studies, according to new research.  In a paper published June 23 in Preventing Chronic Disease, Stephen Soumerai, Harvard Medical School professor of population medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and Huseyin Naci at the London School of Economics analyzed the latest results.

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The mitochondria within a cell are small structures that play an outsized role. They convert oxygen and simple sugars into ATP, the cell’s source of energy, actions essential to metabolic pathways and a cell’s very survival. “Given the importance of mitochondria in human health, it is important to understand the mechanisms underlying their ability to cope with protein-folding stress.

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Nearly 2 million people in the United States are addicted to prescription opioids, and millions more feel the pain, including their families, friends and clinicians. How did we get here? “When we look back in 20 years I want us to say, ‘This is when the country woke up, when we as clinicians decided to step up in our role as leaders, as advocates, to create a foundation for better health.