StemCell Therapy

I had no downtimeI hopped on the subway ideal right after, went to perform, and did almost everything as standard. There was slight redness from the acupuncture and some puffiness all around the injection internet sites but nothing at all that was way too distracting or embarrassing to be observed in public. (Ive heard anecdotally that gals who get the microneedling edition experience more redness and swelling.)

And then the future working day I woke up to the ideal my pores and skin has looked given that, effectively, I cant tell you how lengthy. I have only recently developed out of a decadelong struggle with zits (I still get flare-ups and breakouts), and it really is remaining me some texture and tone concerns. It really is genuinely practically nothing so important that would result in me any duress, but its some thing that I discover about my skin. I see it predominantly all around my cheeks, chin, and mouth: There is certainly the subtlest hint of rolling scars, pigmentation issues, and slight uneven texture total. (I will say that most outsiders likely wouldnt characterize me as possessing acne scars, as I have been diligent with my publish-zits pores and skin treatment and then blur the relaxation with make-up, but it continue to quite substantially annoys me.) It also worried me heading forward pores and skin loses firmness as you get more mature, and any texture issue you develop when you are youthful tends to get even worse. I was nervous that if I experienced these dents now, even if they had been smallwhat would they appear like in 10, 20, 30 decades?

And almost overnight, these indented areas had stuffed out it was the smoothest my pores and skin had at any time been because my initial breakout decades and yrs in the past. To be sincere, I wasnt rather well prepared for it to handle my pimples scarring as well as it did, but board-accredited dermatologist Kiera Barr, M.D., formerly talked about to me that it was becoming employed for healing a variety of pimples scar tissue styles.

Weirdly, what I seen as the most important variance had almost nothing to do with appearances. When I washed my face, I could feel the texture alter: It was plush and tight. The small intricacies of my skin, the ones that you only notice if you contact it day in and day out, felt easy, and the in general high-quality experienced improved.

In the coming days, the skin only enhanced. Firshein tells me that benefits build in excess of time, even though it will probable get started to plateau inevitably. The positive aspects can very last up to 15 months.

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What Are PRP Injections & Acupuncture? I Analyzed The Integrative Therapy - asume tech

Cancer coaches make the disease and survivorship more manageable with goal-oriented plans.

As she recovered and prepared for weeks of alternating radiation therapy and chemotherapy, Gendreau searched for online support groups and information about novel treatments. My medical care team was great, but I didnt feel like they had the time to sit with me, answer questions, explain alternative or complementary therapies or help me discern what my future might look like, Gendreau says. The hospital had a wall plastered with brochures, but I needed more one-on-one engagement and direction. Early on, it became clear that it was primarily my responsibility to research new studies, alternative therapies and potential clinical trials all while I was still recovering from brain surgery.

In her search for answers and resources, Gendreau stumbled onto the webpage for cancer coach Jeannine Walston. I didnt know that cancer coaches existed, Gendreau says. But when I read Walstons story and saw her credentials, I knew she was the person who could help me navigate this confusing new world I was now living in.

In 1998, at age 24, Walston learned she had a rare type of cancerous brain tumor, oligoastrocytoma. Over the past two decades, she has undergone three brain surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy, clinical trials and integrative cancer therapies, even venturing overseas for treatments. Walstons diagnosis changed the trajectory of her life. She embarked on a cancer-focused career path, working as a patient advocate, educator and researcher for nonprofit organizations, the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Healths National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (now the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health). She is also a CURE contributor.

Walston, who lives in Los Angeles, started offering her services as a cancer coach in 2007. At that point, I had provided information to support groups, attended brain tumor and cancer conferences, and worked in the cancer field for 10 years, she says. Many people kept coming to me for advice and information. I wanted to help, and I knew my personal and professional experiences coaching cancer patients and caregivers addressed essential needs.

EMPOWERING PATIENTS TO MEET CHALLENGESThe popularity of professional coaching has grown significantly since the 1990s. There are coaches to help discern purpose in life, improve health and wellness, navigate divorce and break into a new career. Whatever the problem, theres a coach who can offer help. In many ways, cancer coaches are a natural extension of health and wellness coaching, helping clients mainly patients but also caregivers and other loved ones improve quality of life throughout the cancer journey.

Cancer coaches provide a valuable service by helping patients create goal-oriented plans that help them manage particular challenges, says Dawn Wiatrek, interim senior vice president of patient and caregiver support for the American Cancer Society (ACS). As soon as you receive a cancer diagnosis, so many factors are out of your control. Coaches provide needed support and guidance that help patients break down barriers and instill a feeling of confidence. They empower the patient to feel more in charge of an uncertain health situation. Wiatrek notes that the ACS has been coaching people for years through its tobacco cessation program. Cancer coaching is a similar idea, she says. You are giving someone the tools to help them navigate what seems like an insurmountable task.

Talaya Dendy, founder of On the Other Side cancer coaching in St. Paul, Minnesota, says her services save clients from putting time, effort and energy into treatment planning that would be better focused on physical and emotional healing. I research treatments, cancer centers, specialists and available resources and condense that information into easy-to-understand terms that spare the client the gloomy statistics, Dendy says. In addition to helping clients manage the emotional side of cancer, she helps them maximize time with care teams. Patients are often shocked at how little time they actually have with their oncologist or medical team, Dendy says. I make sure my clients are prepared for these appointments so they can advocate for themselves, get the answers they need and make informed decisions.

The ACS sees so many patient benefits to cancer coaching that the organization is using a grant to provide coach training to ACS patient navigators employed at approximately 70 cancer or medical centers nationwide, Wiatrek says. Historically, the role of a navigator has been to provide patients, caregivers and loved ones with resources for things like paying medical expenses, getting to and from treatments and connecting patients to community organizations that can offer assistance, she says. Increasingly, our navigators have found more patients relying on them to counsel them through what questions to ask their care team or asking for more personal guidance.

As employees of hospitals or cancer centers, patient navigators and oncology social workers can help schedule appointments and medical tests, as well as work with billing departments and health insurers, something cancer coaches dont do. Navigators and social workers may steer a patient toward general information about treatments and social support networks, whereas coaches can spend more time researching and gathering information specific to a patients needs.

Preliminary results from the six ACS sites that piloted the patient navigator coach training are positive. Patients said that they felt more confident after being coached on how to improve communication with their care team, Wiatrek says. Patients also understood their treatment plans better, and doctors noted improved compliance. By offering not only in-person sessions but also services via phone, Skype and email, cancer coaches may bridge a gap in care for patients who lack easy access to hospital or cancer center resources.

Because cancer coaching is a relatively new field, few studies address its specific benefits and effectiveness. Findings from a 2017 study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham showed that pairing older cancer patients with nonmedical professionals who received coach-type training reduced patients need for other health care resources, which in turn lowered costs. Other studies on health coaching suggest that these services bolster patient engagement, leading to improved quality of life, reduced hospital readmission rates and lowered medical expenses. Health coaching appears to be especially helpful for people dealing with chronic illnesses like cancer.

A COMPLEMENTARY APPROACH TO CARECancer coaches arent meant to replace patient navigators, oncology social workers or case managers, and they are quick to emphasize that they are not medical experts. I share what I know from my unique patient perspective and decades of experience working in cancer and health care arenas. I do not give medical advice, Walston says.

Gendreau first turned to Walston for help gathering information about possible treatments so that she could consider them, speak to her care team and make informed decisions. My job for a software company required doing a good bit of research, so I felt confident in my researching skills, Gendreau says. Still, I was overwhelmed when I started exploring my condition and treatment options. I felt like I was being buried in a landslide of information.

Walston helped Gendreau create an action plan, breaking down her to-do list into achievable steps. This approach eased some of Gendreaus anxiety and uncertainty. Walston also researched and shared information about integrative therapies, such as yoga, acupuncture and art, something Gendreaus care team didnt seem to have the time or expertise to address.

Most recently, Gendreau asked Walston for help deciphering the vast number of clinical trial opportunities. I could ask my husband or daughter to do some of this research, but that exposes them to all of the scary statistics and information. They are as shocked and frightened as I am, says Gendreau, who emphasizes that Walston serves strictly as her coach and not her therapist. I have a terrific therapist who is helping me cope with my emotions, she says. The coaching aspect gives me a sounding board, a place to discuss ideas and next steps. Having Jeannine to turn to has greatly lifted a burden off of me and my loved ones.

Some medical centers and nonprofit organizations pair patients and mentors who have a similar diagnosis. Cancer coaches go beyond this type of peer-to-peer service. A mentor or peer provides emotional support. They can tell you about their experiences, but their role isnt to give advice or offer suggestions on what you should do, says licensed social worker Angelique Caba, senior director of social work administration for CancerCare, a national nonprofit organization that provides free, professional support services for anyone affected by cancer. A coach provides practical guidance and helps you anticipate barriersto care and troubleshoot for problems.

Donita Wheeler, founder of Donita Mama Bear, a cancer coaching company, believes her services complement those of other specialists. I feel each of us has something unique to offer to the cancer community. We must lean on each other to get through the most difficult times, she says.

That is exactly what Gendreau is doing with her coach. I now know that it was naive of me to expect to get much hand-holding from my oncologist, she says. I appreciate that there are cancer coaches who have taken the worst evil you can imagine and turned it into a passion to help others.

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Putting the Ball In Your Court With Cancer Coaches - Curetoday.com

Antibiotic treatment can disrupt the gut microbiome at the strain level, with changes lasting as long as six months.

Trillions of microbes in the intestine aid human health, including digestion of breast milk, breaking down fiber and helping control the immune system. However, antibiotic treatment is known to disrupt the community structure of these microbes 500 to 1,000 bacterial species that have a mainly beneficial influence.

A study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham now has tracked this disruption at the level of a strain of microbes replacing another strain of the same species in 30 individuals all of them young, healthy adults who would be expected to have stable microbial communities.

As shown from our analysis, the capacity to recover with respect to the number and stability of new strains is specific for each individual, said Casey Morrow, Ph.D., leader of the research team and professor emeritus in UABs Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology.

Differences in recovery have potential health implications, Morrow says.

It is possible that as individuals age, with each differing in numbers and cycles of antibiotic treatment, the reservoir of microbial strains is depleted, resulting in an intra-individual recovery pattern for specific microbial strains, he said. Understanding this recovery pattern including the occurrence of particular strains following antibiotics may be an important consideration for long-term health.

In the future, the characterization of these individual-specific recovery patterns could also be used to forecast the susceptibility to both endogenous and exogenous microbial pathogens.

The UAB study used bioinformatic tools to analyze a previously described study of 18 individuals who had been given a single antibiotic, cefprozil, for a week. Their fecal samples were collected at pre-treatment, at the end of antibiotic treatment and at three months post-treatment. The UAB study also analyzed previously described data of 12 individuals who were given a combination of three antibiotics meropenem, gentamicin and vancomycin for four days. Their fecal samples were collected at pretreatment; at end of treatment; and at four, 38 and 176 days post-treatment. Six control individuals who did not receive antibiotics were also analyzed.

Casey Morrow, Ph.D.In general, the UAB researchers found that strains of the 10 most abundant species remained stable in controls. In the single antibiotic treatment individuals, 15 of 18 individuals had transient new strains post-treatment that, in turn, were replaced by the original strain by three months post-treatment.

In contrast, the triple-antibiotics individuals showed a significant increase of new strains that persisted as long as six months after treatment, as compared to the single antibiotic and the control individuals. Furthermore, the fraction of transient strains was also significantly higher in the multiple antibiotics individuals. This suggested a long-term change to an alternative stable microbiome state, Morrow says. These changes were not due to a difference in growth rates.

Given the importance of the microbiome in human health, we think our results with these data sets can be used to help evaluate microbiome stability under different conditions, Morrow said. For example, we can now provide guidance to clinical investigators to judge the impact of certain treatments for diseases, such as cancer or diabetes, on the gut microbial community that could be significant for evaluation of outcomes. Furthermore, this approach could be applied to a patients pre- and post-hospitalization to identify individuals who may need further management of their microbiomes.

This study used a strain-tracking bioinformatics tool previously developed by UAB, called Window-based Similarity Single-nucleotide-variant, or WSS, for tracking of individuals microbial strains from pre-treatment to post-antibiotics treatment, said Hyunmin Koo, Ph.D., UAB Department of Genetics and Heflin Center for Genomic Science, who led the informatics analysis. This technique advances analysis of the impact of antibiotics on the human gut microbiota. Previous studies of the microbiome had been able to determine an overall taxonomic profile including the relative abundance information of each species, but showed a limitation to distinguish each species at the strain level or track the same strain in each individual at the longitudinal level.

In 2017, the UAB researchers used WSS to show the first direct demonstration that fecal donor microbes used to treat patients with recurrent Clostridium difficile infections remained in recipients for months or years after fecal transplants.

The antibiotics study was published in the Nature Partner Journals Biofilms and Microbiomes. Co-authors with Morrow and Koo are David K. Crossman, UAB Department of Genetics and Heflin Center for Genomic Science; Joseph A. Hakim, UAB Department of Biology; Ranjit Kumar, Biomedical Informatics, UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences; and Elliot J. Lefkowitz, UAB Department of Microbiology.

Support came from the UAB School of Medicine. The Cheaha UABgrid of the UAB Information Technologys Research Computing group provided the high-performance computing support necessary for bioinformatics analyses.

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Transient and long-term disruption of gut microbes after antibiotics - UAB News

Most cancers kill because tumor cells spread beyond the primary site to invade other organs. Now, a USC study of brain-invading breast cancer cells circulating in the blood reveals they have a molecular signature indicating specific organ preferences.

The findings, which appear in Cancer Discovery, help explain how tumor cells in the blood target a particular organ and may enable the development of treatments to prevent the spread of cancers, known as metastasis.

In this study, Min Yu, assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, isolated breast cancer cells from the blood of breast cancer patients with metastatic tumors. Using a technique she developed previously, she expanded or grew the cells in the lab, creating a supply of material to work with.

Analyzing the tumor cells in animal models, Yus lab identified regulator genes and proteins within the cells that apparently directed the cancers spread to the brain. To test this concept, human tumor cells were injected into the bloodstream of animal models. As predicted, the cells migrated to the brain. Additional analysis of cells from one patients tumor predicted that the cells would later spread to the patients brain and they did.

Yu also discovered that a protein on the surface of brain-targeting tumor cells helps them to breach the blood-brain barrier and lodge in brain tissue, while another protein inside the cells shield them from the brains immune response, enabling them to grow there.

We can imagine someday using the information carried by circulating tumor cells to improve the detection, monitoring and treatment of the spreading cancers, Yu said. A future therapeutic goal is to develop drugs that get rid of circulating tumor cells or target those molecular signatures to prevent the spread of cancer.

Yu is a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, and her laboratory is located in the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In addition to Yu, other authors of the study are Remi Klotz, Amal Thomas, Teng Teng, Sung Min Han, Oihana Iriondo, Lin Li, Alan Wang, Negeen Izadian, Matthew MacKay, Byoung-San Moon, Kevin J. Liu, Sathish Kumar Ganesan, Grace Lee, Diane S. Kang, Michael F. Press, Wange Lu, Janice Lu, Bodour Salhia and Frank Attenello, all of the Keck School of Medicine; Sara Restrepo-Vassalli, James Hicks and Andrew D. Smith of USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Charlotte S. Walmsley, Christopher Pinto, Dejan Juric and Aditya Bardia of Massachusetts General Hospital.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (DP2 CA206653) the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation, the Stop Cancer Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Alexander & Margaret Stewart Trust, the SC CTSI pilot grant (UL1TR001855 and UL1TR000130), a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) postdoctoral fellowship and a CIRM Bridges award (EDUC2-08381), and the National Cancer Institute (P30CA014089).

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New study reveals why breast cancer spreads to the brain - USC News

Cindi Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield

Cindi Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield

Photo: Dan Haar / Hearst Connecticut Media / Dan Haar / Hearst Connecticut Me

Cindi Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield

Cindi Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield

Innovation TED Talks coming to Fairfield University

FAIRFIELD Fairfield University will host a diverse line-up of speakers at a TEDx program on October 28.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design topics that combined in 1984 to form the first TED Talk in Monterey, Calif.

Today, the idea has been expanded to sharing ideas worth spreading. TEDx, programs launched in 2009 to share TED-worthy ideas on a smaller scale.

Featured in the Fairfield U event at Wien Experimental Theatre of the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts will be a current student, an alumna, an honorary degree recipient, and a faculty member, as well as individuals in health care, education, business, and technology.

Doors open at 2 p.m. and the event is free but registration is required. While TEDx audiences are capped at 100 to promote an intimate live experience, overflow attendees will be invited to watch the presentations via live-stream in the adjacent Kelley Theatre.

The theme for the event will be Innovation and Inspiration, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the university's School of Engineering.

The nine speakers include:

* Dr. Stephen F. Badylak, deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

* David C. Banks, president and CEO of The Eagle Academy Foundation, Inc.

* Cindi Bigelow, the third-generation president and CEO of Bigelow Tea, headquartered in Fairfield.

* Dr. Donna Coletti, scholar-in-residence at the Egan Schools Kanarek Center for Palliative Care.

* Lilliana Delmonico Class of 2020 and a bioengineering major in the School of Engineering and co-founder of the Biomedical Engineering Society at Fairfield University.

* Dr. T. Sloane Guy, professor of surgery and director of Minimally Invasive & Robotic Cardiac Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

* Aidan Kehoe, founder and CEO of Skout Cybersecurity.

* Dawne Ware, Class of 1989 and CEO of Ware Consulting LLC.

* Mark Unger, owner and director of Unger Global Companies, who wrote his book First Survivor, to honor those who helped him reject the diagnosis of zero chance of survival when his son was diagnosed with childhood cancer.

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Innovation TED Talks coming to Fairfield University - CTPost

Antleron has created an R&D facility at their headquarters in Leuven, Belgium - a location known as an incubator for medical and life science innovation, including regenerative medicine, to support and validate customer projects in the field of 3D bioprinting. Antleron's 'living therapy factory' mergescells, biomaterials, biologics, bioreactors and 3D Systems printers to accelerate the engineering of living therapies. Using quality-by-design and artificial intelligence the Antleron multidisciplinary specialists translate these core technologies into pioneering workflows that turn cells into therapies.

The 3D Systems/Antleron relationship addresses solutions for medical device and advanced therapy medicinal product (ATMP) applications, incorporating a variety of innovative technologies that are of benefit to biomedical manufacturing process, beginning with 3D Systems' ProJet MJP 2500and Figure 43D printers and existing portfolio of 21 biocompatible, USP Class VI materials; 3D Sprintand 3DXpertsoftware, and post-processing equipment and processes. The goal is to establish a flexible, scalable Digital Factory approach, built on modular, closed parametric processes which include digital monitoring and quality control for risk mitigation. An example is to advance the way cells and tissues are grown to enable the transition from a static 2D to bioreactor-based 3D cell culture. This can lead to new ways to manufacture functionalized medical implants, vaccines, cell therapies, and living tissues.

According to Antleron CEO, Jan Schrooten, "The vision of Antleron is to sustainably bring living therapies into the clinic. 3D printing is key to this endeavor, and we are eager to collaborate with 3D Systems and its experts. I look forward to the pioneering solutions we'll be able to achieve to elevate the efficacy of bioprinting and extend its biomedical application reach."

"3D Systems is excited about working with Antleron as they explore bioprinting, and especially their capability to develop end-to-end solutions utilizing the 3D Systems' state of the art printing platforms and materials," said Chuck Hull, co-founder and chief technology officer, 3D Systems. "As we look to the future, bioprinting and regenerative medicine are large opportunities for 3D printing, and we look forward to expanding the role 3D Systems will play in these exciting fields."

At Formnext 2019 to be held November 19-22, 3D Systems (booth D03, hall 12.1) and Antleron will exhibit for the first time what is in store for next-generation medical applications with the ProJet MJP 2500 printer and VisiJet materials.

Forward-Looking StatementsCertain statements made in this release by or in reference to 3D Systems that are not statements of historical or current facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In many cases, forward looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "may," "will," "estimates," "intends," "anticipates" or "plans" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are based upon management's beliefs, assumptions and current expectations and may include comments as to the company's beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside the control of the company. The factors described under the headings "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in 3D Systems' periodic filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other factors, could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected or predicted in forward-looking statements. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not, and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance or results, nor will they necessarily prove to be accurate indications of the times at which such performance or results will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included are made only as the date of the statement. 3D Systems undertakes no obligation to update or review any forward-looking statements made by management or on its behalf, whether as a result of future developments, subsequent events or circumstances or otherwise.

About 3D Systems More than 30 years ago, 3D Systems brought the innovation of 3D printing to the manufacturing industry. Today, as the leading AM solutions company, it empowers manufacturers to create products and business models never before possible through transformed workflows. This is achieved with the Company's best-of-breed digital manufacturing ecosystem - comprised of plastic and metal 3D printers, print materials, on-demand manufacturing services and a portfolio of end-to-end manufacturing software. Each solution is powered by the expertise of the company's application engineers who collaborate with customers to transform manufacturing environments. 3D Systems' solutions address a variety of advanced applications for prototyping through production in markets such as aerospace, automotive, medical, dental and consumer goods. More information on the company is available at http://www.3dsystems.com.

About AntleronAntleron is a young R&D company on a mission to enable personalized manufacturing 4.0 in the domain of advanced therapies. The company's nimble team is revolutionizing medicine by merging the potential of cells, biomaterials, biologics, 3D printing and bioreactors to accelerate the engineering of living therapies - empowering patients with fully personalized, regenerative care. Antleron translates core technologies including additive manufacturing (AM), quality-by-design and artificial intelligence into pioneering workflows that turn cells into living therapies to eventually make organ manufacturing a reality. To support its mission, Antleron's business philosophy is to create sustainable ventures that bring living, personalized therapies from idea to patient through risk & reward sharing partnerships. From the company's headquarters in Belgium, Antleron operates at the cutting edge between life sciences and technology within Europe's leading biotech ecosystem. More information on the company is available at http://www.antleron.com.

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3D Systems and Antleron Collaborating to Accelerate 3D Printing Biomedical Breakthroughs - PRNewswire

Phoenix,AZ(October 11, 2019) AxolotlBiologix, an innovative biotechnology leader in regenerative medicine,announced it has obtained HealthcareCommon Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) billing codes from the Centers forMedicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for all its products effective October 1,2019.

Were thrilled that the CMS has made it easier forhealthcare providers to get reimbursed for treatments using Axolotl products,said Gary Lauterbach, CEO of AxolotlBiologix. Axolotls products are already part of the GSAs FederalSupply Schedule and areavailable through Indian Health Services and Veterans Affairs. Issuance of these HCPCS Q-Codes by CMS will help simplify thereimbursement process making it easier to utilize our regenerative products.

AxolotlsDualGraft and Axolotl Graft products have been assigned the code Q4210.Axolotls DualGraft is a bi-layered human amnion membrane patch that protectswounds while serving as a barrier to help encourage skin repair andreconstruction. DualGraft is a double-layered amniotic membrane convenientlypackaged as a dehydrated allograft, which can be stored at room temperature andapplied without special instruments in a clinical setting.

AxolotlAmbient and Axolotl Cryo products were assigned the code Q4215. AxolotlAmbient and Axolotl Cryo products are liquid allografts derived from theamniotic components of the placenta to promote regeneration and repair ofdamaged or degenerated tissue. The Ambient product is a liquid allograft that can be stored at an ambienttemperature (257C, 7713F).

For more information on Axolotl products visit http://www.axobio.com

About Axolotl Biologix:

Axolotl Biologix, Inc.is an innovative biotechnology leader in regenerative medicine throughresearch, technology and clinical application. Axolotl Biologix is expandingthe human bodys ability to regenerate by developing and manufacturingregenerative human cell and tissue medical technologies that are disruptingtraditional, more invasive, painful and expensive treatment protocols. For moreinformation, visit http://www.axobio.com

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Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Makes It Easier for Healthcare Providers to Choose Axolotl Biologix Products to Spur Wound and Tissue...

According to a recent press release on Global Regenerative Medicines Market Outlook: Industry Analysis & Opportunity Evaluation 2018-2025 which delivers detailed overview of the global regenerative medicines market in terms of market segmentation by technology, source, application, end-users and region.

Further, for the in-depth analysis, the report encompasses the industry growth drivers, restraints, supply and demand risk, trends and regulations & policies.

The Regenerative Medicines industry caters to the individuals with a long-term requirement to treat chronic oncogenic, immunogenic or infectious diseases. Research Nester released a report stating that the market is currently expanding and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.33% during the forecast period (2018-2027). By 2027, the global regenerative medicine market is predicted to reach USD 64.32 Billion.

Various funding programs initiated by the International Society for Stem Cell Research in the past as well as in the future are expected to attract large number of potential new players in the regenerative medicines market. Research Grants from organizations such as, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Sponsorship Programmes, Alliance for Regenerative Rehabilitation and Training Center and Biotechnology, California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are expected to create higher opportunities for regenerative medicines research and development.

Asia Pacific region is projected to witness enormous growth in forthcoming years. Country governments such as Japan and China across Asia-Pacific are drafting policies to advocate building new infrastructure (and research networks) to push towards a profitable commercialization of regenerative medicine products. Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MST),the State of Food and Drug Agency and the Ministry of Health have issued approximately 30 new rules and regulations to increase the development of regenerative medicines across the country. Further, in 2014 Pharmaceutical and Medical Device (PMD) Act and the Safety of Regenerative Medicine Act issued in Japan, new regulations to accelerate the approval process of regenerative medicine products. These initiatives across the countries of Asia-Pacific by the local governments are projected to drive the regenerative medicines market exponentially over the forthcoming years.

To Request a Report Sample for Research Scope CLICK HERE

The global regenerative medicines market is segmented on the basis of technology into gene therapies, cellular therapies, exosome therapeutics and tissue engineering wherein cellular therapies segment is further segmented into cellular immunotherapies, stem cell therapies, therapeutics utilizing, differentiated cell types and direct cell reprogramming.

Growing demand for organ transplantation in developed and developing countries and the commercialization of regenerative medicines are some of the key trends anticipated to supplement the growth of the global regenerative medicine market through the forecast period. Increased use of skin substitutes, grafts, bone matrix and other tissue engineered regenerative medicines are one of the prominent factor backing for the growth of the global regenerative medicine market over the forthcoming years.

The market is further segmented based on the source as autologous and allogeneic. Kite Pharma and Fosun Pharma created joint venture in China to commercialize autologous t-cell therapies to cure cancer in 2019. According to this agreement, Fosun Pharma will deliver the RMB equal of $20 million in financing to sustenance clinical development and engineering activities and kite will provide certain technical transfer facilities to the joint venture. Such ventures in the regenerative medicines market are boosting the autologous segmental growth around the globe.

Despite its innumerable benefits, Regenerative Medicines market is expected to have its own share of challenges and limitations such as the issues of high costs, requirement for highly skilled professionals, and stringent regulatory standards. These are some of the restraining factors that might affect the growth of the market over the forecast period.

This report also provides the existing competitive scenario of some of the key players of the global regenerative medicines market which includes company profiling of Smith & Nephew Plc., Sangamo, Integra LifeSciences Corporation, Novartis, Stryker Corporation and other prominent players. In order to expand the market presence, Regenerative Medicines companies are expanding their product line extensively. For an instance, Baxter International announced its participation in The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM) and the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center organized conference for its product upliftment and gaining greater insights into its research and development activities for regenerative medicines.

The profiling enfolds key information of the companies which encompasses business overview, products and services, key financials and recent news and developments. On the whole, the report depicts detailed overview of the global Regenerative Medicines market that will help industry consultants, existing players searching for expansion opportunities, new players searching possibilities and other stakeholders to align their market centric strategies according to the ongoing and expected trends in the future.

To request a sample report for Technological Breakthroughs CLICK HERE

About Research Nester:

Research Nester is a one-stop service provider with a client base in more than 50 countries, leading in strategic market research and consulting with an unbiased and unparalleled approach towards helping global industrial players, conglomerates and executives for their future investment while avoiding forthcoming uncertainties. With an out-of-the-box mindset to produce statistical and analytical market research reports, we provide strategic consulting so that our clients can make wise business decisions with clarity while strategizing and planning for their forthcoming needs and succeed in achieving their future endeavors. We believe every business can expand to its new horizon, provided a right guidance at a right time is available through strategic minds.

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Regenerative Medicines - A More Effective and Result Oriented Way to treat chronic Diseases for Long Term Range - PharmiWeb.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Scientists looking for a way to help breast cancer patients have found a new organelle inside cells that may help.

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine say the organelle works to prevent cancer by ensuring that genetic material is sorted correctly as cells divide and problems with this organelle have been connected to a subset of breast cancer tumors due to a lot of mistakes when segregating chromosomes.

According to a release, this analysis offers a new way for doctors to sort patient tumors as they choose the therapies that may be used to treat the patients.

The researchers hope these insights will help doctors to better personalize treatments to best benefit patients, potentially sparing up to 40 percent of breast cancer patients from treatment that will not be effective.

Some percentage of women get chemotherapy drugs for breast cancer that are not very effective. They are poisoned, in pain and their hair falls out, so if it isn't curing their disease, then that's tragic, said researcher P. Todd Stukenberg, PhD, of the UVA Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. One of our goals is to develop new tests to determine whether a patient will respond to a chemotherapeutic treatment, so they can find an effective treatment right away.

Stukenberg and his team of researchers ay the organelle they found is essential but ephemeral, as it only forms when needed to ensure chromosomes are sorted correctly. It then disappears when that task is complete.

Stukenberg also compares the organelle to a droplet of liquid that condenses within other liquid, saying the droplets act like mixing bowls that concentrate certain cellular ingredients to allow for biochemical reactions to occur in a specific location.

What's exciting is that cells have this new organelle and certain things will be recruited into it and other things will be excluded, he said. The cells enrich things inside the droplet and, all of a sudden, new biochemical reactions appear only in that location. It's amazing.

He says the organelle acts more like a gel that allows cellular components to come in and exit but it has binding sites that concentrate a small set of the cell's contents.

Our data suggests this concentration of proteins is really important, said Stukenberg. I can get complex biochemical reactions to occur inside a droplet that I've been failing to reconstitute in a test tube for years. This is the secret sauce I've been missing.

The release adds that researchers have known for about eight years that cells make droplets like this for other processes, but they did not know they are made on chromosomes during cell division.

Stukenberg thinks such droplets are common and more important than previously understood, saying the cells are using these non-membranous organelles to regulate much of their work.

The release says this discovery helps scientists better understand the process of mitosis, or cell division, and it sheds light on cancer and how it occurs.

The organelle's main function is to fix mistakes in tiny microtubules that pull apart chromosomes when cells are dividing. They ensure that each cell gets the correct genetic material.

However, in cancer cells, the repair process is defective, and the cancer cells can be driven to be more aggressive.

Stukenberg has also developed tests to measure the amount of chromosome mis-segregation in tumors, which he hopes will allow doctors to pick the proper treatment for patients.

His next step he says will be to examine the strange organelle's role in colorectal cancer.

The findings have been described in the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology.

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Researchers find new organelle that may help cancer patients - CBS19 News

When Christian Porras came to the University of Chicago three years ago, he knew he had a passion for science. What was less apparent to him was how to chart a path from first-year student to research scientist.

As a first-generation college student from a low-income household, Porras didnt know anyone who had taken a similar path. That changed when he connected with the UChicago chapter of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.

SACNAS became this community, this family for me. It removed some of the uncertainties about my professional goals because I was able to talk to people who were further down the path, Porras said. Now a fourth-year majoring in biological sciences, Porras is undergraduate president of the campus chapter.

This month, SACNAS named the UChicago group chapter of the year for demonstrating significant accomplishments and activities across five areasrecruitment and membership retention, professional development, community outreach, chapter development and fundraising.

One reason for the honor was a regional conference that the leadership team of the UChicago chapter planned earlier this year. They oversaw the 2019 Midwest Regional SACNAS Conference, which brought more than 200 students from the Midwest and around the United States to UChicago for a day of research presentations and professional development.

With the theme Empowering through Boundaries, the conference focused on inclusion and helping students overcome the challenge of breaking through career obstacles. Workshops covered a range of topicsfrom crafting compelling academic applications to including disabilities in discussions about diversity.

This award is an acknowledgement and appreciation of all the hard work that our chapter has put in, not just this year, but over the course of its history at UChicago, said Juan Manuel Vazquez, graduate president of the organization and a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Human Genetics. He served as chair and lead for the 2019 Midwest conference.

The UChicago chapter of SACNAS was formed in 2016 and became a registered student organization in 2018. The organization has about 50 members, however, its events are open to all students and draw people from different backgrounds and disciplines. Lucia Rothman Denes, the A. J. Carlson Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, serves as its faculty adviser.

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Student group works to foster diversity in the sciences - UChicago News

Adding carvedilol, the active compound of a blood pressuremedicine, to enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) for Pompe disease can improve its effectiveness in reaching and strengthening skeletal muscles, a study in mice suggests.

This finding, Evaluation of antihypertensive drugs in combination with enzyme replacement therapy in mice with Pompe disease was published in Molecular Genetics and Metabolism.

At present, enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) is the only effective treatment for Pompe disease, a rare genetic disorder caused by the absence or deficiency of the acid alpha-glucosidase (GAA) enzyme.

When GAA activity is low, a sugar molecule called glycogen accumulates inside cells, damaging organs and tissues throughout the body, but primarily skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, and cardiac muscle. If left untreated, the accumulation of glycogen in cardiac and skeletal muscle leads to severe and progressive muscular weakness, risking heart and respiratory failure.

There is, however, a major limitation in ERT. Skeletal muscle is less accessible to it, meaning the therapy has trouble getting into this type of muscle cell. Skeletal muscles poor response to ERT has been attributed to a serious lack of a protein receptor called cation-independent mannose-6-phosphate receptor (CI-MPR) on its cells.

Animal studies suggest that an active compound common to blood pressure medications (with work to control hypertension) could increase the uptake of ERT by muscle cells, by increasing the amount of muscle (muscle hypertrophy), and therefore the amount of CI-MPR.

Investigators atDuke Universityevaluated the effects of ERT with and without three anti-hypertensive agents: carvedilol, losartan, and propranolol. All these compounds have different ways of working, or mechanisms of action, in the body. They experimented using a mouse model of Pompe disease called the GAA knockout (absent) mouse.

Animals were assigned to one of seven groups: no treatment, ERT alone, ERT with carvedilol, ERT with losartan, ERT with propranolol, or to only losartan or carvedilol. Drugs were given to the mice in drinking water, and one week after treatment initiation, recombinant human GAA was given by injection every week for a month. Five days following the last GAA injection, scientists examined the animals cardiac and muscle function.

The team reported that carvedilol uniquely increased muscle strength, while losartan uniquely decreased heart rate. GAA activity was also found to be significantly higher in the heart following either losartan or propranolol being added to enzyme replacement therapy, compared to mice left untreated as a control group.

Both carvedilol or propranolol significantly increased GAA activity in the animals quadriceps, the muscles in the front of the thigh, compared to control mice. However, only carvedilol administration significantly increased GAA activity in quadriceps, in comparison with ERT alone, the scientists wrote.

These findings indicate that the greatest rise in enzymatic activity occurred in response to carvedilol, the active substance in the blood pressure medication Coreg. Carvedilol is a beta-blocker that relaxes the smooth muscle that makes up blood vessels, leading to an overall reduction in blood pressure.

Because more than half (seven of 13) of the mice given losartan, either alone or in combination with ERT, died during the study, researchers thought this active molecule potentially toxic in Pompe, and suggested physicians should be mindful of it when prescribing high blood pressure medications to Pompe patients.

Currently we demonstrated unique toxicity from the administration of losartan in mice with Pompe disease, the researchers wrote.

Because of the benefits seen in diseased micegiven carvedilol during ERT, they recommended the compound be studied in a clinical trial in patients.

Carvedilol was well-tolerated, and the ability to use a -blocker [beta-blocker] in patients that will not interfere with ERT would be highly valuable for clinical use in patients with Pompe since they often require a -blocker to mitigate disease-associated hypertension, the investigators concluded.

A clinical trial of carvedilol in patients with Pompe disease should be considered to further evaluate its usefulness.

With over three years of experience in the medical communications business, Catarina holds a BSc. in Biomedical Sciences and a MSc. in Neurosciences. Apart from writing, she has been involved in patient-oriented translational and clinical research.

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Margarida graduated with a BS in Health Sciences from the University of Lisbon and a MSc in Biotechnology from Instituto Superior Tcnico (IST-UL). She worked as a molecular biologist research associate at a Cambridge UK-based biotech company that discovers and develops therapeutic, fully human monoclonal antibodies.

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ERT to Treat Pompe May Work Better in Combo with Blood Pressure Medication, Study Says - Pompe Disease News

COURTESY OF SARAH PALMER/THE GAIRDNER FOUNDATION

The Gairdner/LOral-UNESCO Forum on Diversity and Excellence in Science took place at the MaRS Centre on September 30.

The conference was hosted in part by the Gairdner Foundation, which aims to recognize international excellence in fundamental research that impacts human health.

Many groups are underrepresented in research, including women, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, Indigenous people, and socially disadvantaged populations, said Dr. Janet Rossant, a professor at U of Ts Departments of Molecular Genetics and Obstetrics & Gynaecology, in an interview with The Varsity. Rossant is also the president and scientific director of the Gairdner Foundation, and chief of research emeritus at the SickKids Research Institute.

This is an ongoing conversation and ongoing discussion that we have to have across many aspects of our lives today.

Stories from the front line

A panel discussion named Diversity in STEMM- Stories from the Frontline included Dr. Eugenia Duodu, Dr. Quarraisha Abdool Karim, and Dr. Janet Smylie, and was moderated by Dr. Imogen Coe.

We need to be having those conversations about those kinds of uncomfortable things in order to move forward, said Coe, a professor at Ryerson Universitys Faculty of Science, and an advocate for equity in STEM.

Smylie is a professor at U of Ts Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and also serves as the director of the Well Living House, which focuses on bettering health outcomes for Indigenous children and families.

Her talk focused on the importance of a balance of power, specifically highlighting the importance of finding an individual balance in ones life.

Duodu received her PhD in chemistry from U of T and is the chief executive officer of Visions of Science, a charitable organization which uses STEM as a way to empower youth from low-income areas in Toronto.

She spoke about a time where she was not invited to a competition that her colleagues were invited to. It was really interesting that there was this kind of assumption that this is not something that I would [want to] be a part of, she said.

Karim is the associate scientific director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, a research centre focused on studying HIV. She is also a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Centre.

She discussed how her activism work tied into the medical work she was doing. That anti-apartheid activism era in my life gave me an opportunity to respect all forms of knowledge, she said.

She further elaborated that it enabled her to understand, even in communities where literacy levels are low and people may not have degrees, [that] they have important knowledge that could be tapped into.

Afternoon STEM talks

The afternoon session included eight talks about STEM topics with LOral-UNESCO scientists Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva, Dr. Vanessa DCosta, Dr. Janet Rossant, Dr. Nausheen Sadiq, Dr. Victoria Arbour, Dr. Molly Shoichet, Dr. Kate (Hyun) Lee, and Karim.

The concept of arsenic in rice was discussed in Sadiqs talk, who is a research chemist at Brooks Applied Labs and a LOral-UNESCO for Women in Science fellow. The reasoning behind this, Sadiq said, is that in Canada, there is no set limit for arsenic in food.

A focus of Sadiqs PhD research was on arsenic levels in rice. A type of rice she looked at was rice cereal, which is often eaten by babies, which has relatively high amounts of arsenic.

If you take [one thing] away from today, from me speaking, said Sadiq jokingly, its please wash your rice.

Tags: Diversity, Science, STEM

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An ongoing conversation on diversity in science - Varsity

SOUTH PLAINFIELD, N.J., Oct. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --PTC Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: PTCT) today announced new results from its investigational gene therapy, PTC-AADC, in patients living with aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) deficiency. The datademonstrated clinically meaningful and sustained improvements in motor, cognitive and language milestones. These included the ability to sit, walk, and talk and represents up to five years of follow up post-treatment.1,2 PTC-AADC is a one-time gene therapy treatment of the human dopa decarboxylase (DDC) gene administered into the putamen, which supports production of key neurotransmitters. The data were presented at the Child Neurology Society 48th Annual Meeting.

"We are excited to see the transformational effects in AADC deficiency patients in this long-term study as patients with severe AADC deficiency never achieve the ability to sit, walk or talk," said Stuart Peltz, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of PTC Therapeutics. "We are on track to submit a BLA to the FDA by the end of the year and are proud to be on the verge of bringing the first commercial treatment for AADC deficiency patients which is in line with our mission of bringing clinically differentiated treatments to patients with rare disorders."

New analysis evaluated outcomes of 26 patients with AADC deficiency across three separate clinical trials,2 making it the most comprehensive analysis of patients treated with PTC-AADC to date. Specifically, these results showed that 12 months post-treatment with PTC-AADC, patients' mean body weight had increased from 12.0 kg to 15.2 kg, and the frequency of oculogyric crises (involuntary upward eye movement) was reduced.2 Dyskinesia (involuntary movements) was the most frequently recorded adverse event, however most events were mild or moderate and all cases resolved by 10 months post-treatment.2

"In addition to failing to reach key developmental milestones, such as walking and talking, children with AADC deficiency can experience severe symptoms that affect their everyday lives. These symptoms can include episodes of oculogyric crises, which can last for minutes or hours and involve sustained upward movement of the eyes, involuntary movements of the neck, tongue protrusions and jaw spasms, which can be very distressing for patients and their families," said Claudio Santos, M.D., Senior Vice President, Global Medical Affairs, PTC Therapeutics. "The post-treatment data presented at CNS confirm reductions in the number of patients experiencing oculogyric crises, suggesting that this gene therapy treatment has the potential to make a real difference in the lives of patients with AADC deficiency."

A separate analysis of a long-term study demonstrated the sustained efficacy of PTC-AADC up to five years.1 These are the longest data available for any investigational treatment for AADC deficiency. These results showed clinically meaningful and sustained improvements in motor, cognitive and language milestones up to five years post-treatment with PTC-AADC.1

An additional abstract building on the existing understanding of AADC deficiency was also presented, giving a disease state overview that highlights the potential importance of a gene therapy to treat this condition.3

About aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) deficiencyAromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) deficiency is a rare genetic condition caused by a mutation in the dopa decarboxylase (DDC) gene, resulting in a lack of functioning AADC enzyme, which is responsible for the final step in the synthesis of key neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin.4

AADC deficiency results in delays or failure to reach developmental milestones such as head control, sitting, standing, walking, or talking, low muscle tone (also known as muscular hypotonia), severe, seizure-like episodes involving involuntary eye movement (also known as oculogyric crises), autonomic abnormalities, and the need for life-long care.4 Given this neurologically devastating illness, patients with severe AADC deficiency have a high risk of death during childhood. There are currently no approved therapies that address the underlying cause.

About PTC Therapeutics, Inc.PTC is a science-driven, global biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of clinically-differentiated medicines that provide benefits to patients with rare disorders. PTC's ability to globally commercialize products is the foundation that drives investment in a robust pipeline of transformative medicines and our mission to provide access to best-in-class treatments for patients who have an unmet medical need. To learn more about PTC, please visit us onwww.ptcbio.comand follow us onFacebook, on Twitter at @PTCBio, and on LinkedIn.

For More Information:

Investors:Emily Hill+ 1 (908) 912-9327ehill@ptcbio.com

Media: Jane Baj+1 (908) 912-9167 jbaj@ptcbio.com

References:

Forward-LookingStatements:This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements contained in this release, other than statements of historic fact, are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding: the future expectations, plans and prospects for PTC; expectations with respect to PTC's gene therapy platform, including any potential regulatory submissions; PTC's strategy, future operations, future financial position, future revenues, projected costs; and the objectives of management. Other forward-looking statements may be identified by the words "guidance", "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "target," "potential," "will," "would," "could," "should," "continue," and similar expressions.

PTC's actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements it makes as a result of a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those related to: expectations with respect to the potential financial impact or PTC's ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the acquisition of Agilis and its gene therapy platform, including with respect to the business of Agilis and expectations with respect to the potential achievement of development, regulatory and sales milestones and contingent payments to the former Agilis equityholders with respect thereto and PTC's ability to obtain marketing approval of PTC-AADC and other product candidates acquired from Agilis, will not be realized or will not be realized within the expected time period; significant transaction costs, unknown liabilities, the risk of litigation and/or regulatory actions related to the acquisition of its gene therapy pipeline, as well as other business effects, including the effects of industry, market, economic, political or regulatory conditions; the eligible patient base and commercial potential of PTC-AADC; and the factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of PTC's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, as well as any updates to these risk factors filed from time to time in PTC's other filings with the SEC. You are urged to carefully consider all such factors.

As with any pharmaceutical under development, there are significant risks in the development, regulatory approval and commercialization of new products. There are no guarantees that any product will receive or maintain regulatory approval in any territory, or prove to be commercially successful, including PTC-AADC.

The forward-looking statements contained herein represent PTC's views only as of the date of this press release and PTC does not undertake or plan to update or revise any such forward-looking statements to reflect actual results or changes in plans, prospects, assumptions, estimates or projections, or other circumstances occurring after the date of this press release except as required by law.

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PTC Therapeutics Announces Results from Long-Term AADC Deficiency Gene Therapy Treatment Demonstrating Sustained Improvements - P&T Community

Prior to 2014, there were only a few thousand adult day centers operating throughout the United States. Today, there are likely over 10,000 centers in existence, each one trying to make a lasting mark in an extremely fragmented industry.

Founded in 1991, Tennessee-based Centennial Adultcare Center is among that group. The medical-model adult day provider is led by CEO William Zagorski, who says big things are in store for the space in months and years to come.

Home Health Care News recently caught up with Zagorski during the latest installment of its podcast, Disrupt.

Among topics of conversation, the CEO outlined industry challenges and explained how at-home care providers will play a critical role in adult days future. Zagorski a member of the National Adult Day Services Associations board of directors also discussed how the adult day model is becoming increasingly for-profit.

Highlights from HHCNs conversation with Zagorski are below, edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to Disrupt via Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast app.

Zagorski: American Senior Care Centers is our corporate name. We operate as Centennial Adultcare Center. We have three medical-model adult day health care facilities in the central Tennessee area. We also operate non-medical in-home care services and transportation services, all of which are under our Centennial Adultcare Center brand.

But that medical model of adult day is our primary focus. We serve Individuals 18 and over of all acuity ranges. That means all diagnoses, all physical and cognitive conditions. There are very few individuals who we have not been able to help over the years.

Were the largest comprehensive, medical-model adult day health care facility in Tennessee.

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Happy to be the first! Adult day health care is certainly a newer, lesser-known part of the continuum of care, so Im happy to talk about it.

Its a long story that takes lots of meandering paths.

My parents started our company back in 1991. One of the main inspiring factors was a grandmother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimers, who then moved from Chicago to Nashville to live with us.

She attended a social-model adult day program in Nashville for a number of years. But as soon as her acuity rose to where she could no longer attend the social programs, there was nowhere for her to go. So we set up shop as the first medical-model adult day health care provider in Tennessee. We were one of the only providers able to assist individuals with advanced dementia, you know, progressing to the point of wandering, incontinence and other issues.

Thats the genesis of our company. I was younger when that company opened and did not plan on staying in Tennessee. My personal history is mired in scientific research; I spent a number of years in cancer research, then in molecular genetics as my primary academic research through the late 90s and early 2000s.

I came back to our company in 2011. Weve increased our daily attendance by double since. I opened our second location in 2015. And then our third location in late 2017.

Our in-home care agency has been in progress for a number of years as well, though theres been some growth and retraction.

Adult day mirrors the same growth trends that were seeing in home health and home care. The driving factor is individuals want to remain living at home.

Historically, adult day has existed throughout the United States for decades. It took off in the late 70s and 80s, mostly on the East Coast and West Coast. It has been a little bit slower to grow through the Midwest and even slower in the South.

But it continues to grow overall, ramping up over the past five years. In fact, today, there are probably close to 10,000 adult day centers in the U.S., which is up almost 50% from 2014.

One of the factors inhibiting growth is the fact theres no federal model or federal definition of what adult day care is. Its regulated differently from state to state, with some states being more permissive for social-model or medical-model services.

As of 2016, slightly over 50% of the adult day centers throughout the country are in the for-profit space as opposed to the nonprofit world. Thats been a big switch compared to the past.

There has also been a divergence between the social model of adult day services and the medical model. There has been a social stigma around this industry, so we try to be consistent with terms for what different players are doing. The common nomenclature is to use adult day services for the social model, then adult day health care for the medical model.

Yeah. Very much so. I mean, the different regulation from state to state is so significant. Just look at the state-to-state variation on licensure and certification. There are a dozen or so states that still have no type of licensure status. Theres still a few where its like the Wild West. Of course, there are also Medicaid issues. There are lower reimbursement states or the Medicaid-prohibitive states, usually in the Deep South or in lower-income, lower-population areas in the North.

And when it comes to access to care, since adult day is a lesser-known model and varies from place to place, nobody really knows what adult day really is. They dont know whether its adult day services or adult day health care, whether adult day is part of the continuum of care or separate.

Theres a lot of confusion and lack of knowledge.

It certainly can be a profitable space. And I think thats really reflected by the for-profit side of the industry doubling in recent years. But its hard to define what the margins are because reimbursement models differ so much. And theres a lot of providers that only operate in a Medicaid space. Theres some providers that only operate in a private-pay space. Some people work with the VA.

Weve been a for-profit company for the better part of 30 years, and its been profitable over that time for sure, but it varies. The fact is that youre in a conglomerate setting where your staffing levels are slightly lower, so youre able to do things that are slightly lower in terms of expense rate.

Its difficult to answer on the margins. A ballpark answer, you know, theyre somewhere, probably between 1% and 40%.

Were able to staff at a slightly lower level than the one-on-one care thats needed for home care.

In the adult day setting, most states are in the six-to-one or eight-to-one suggested or mandatory ratios. Most organizations run in the four-to-one or six-to-one ratios. Another advantage is service availability, being able to provide services without interruption. Centers can be staffed with three to six employees at any given time.

Cost is certainly a competitive advantage. The average cost of adult day is $72 a day and thats usually for six to 10 hours of care. In Tennessee, most of the companies we work with are open for eight to 11 hours per day. Some of them are even open on weekends. So being able to provide services for 10 hours at $72 a day is certainly a competitive advantage.

Medical oversight in the adult day health care industry is continuing to progress, and most centers have registered nurses on staff to provide ongoing medical oversight as well as medication assistance and management of vitals.

Many centers are truly interdisciplinary, with masters-level social workers, registered dietitians, RNs, LPNs, recreational therapists. Many programs bring in pet therapist, music therapist, art therapist so the ability to provide comprehensive therapeutic services in a conglomerate setting provide some unique advantages and a social situation. Not to mention the social determinants of health were avoiding avoiding geriatric depression and combating loneliness.

Adult day health care is great, but it cant do it all. Centers cant be open all the time. They cant do everything. It is essential for individual providers or larger companies to be able to associate with home-based care providers and wraparound services, including transportation.

If you take in-home services, transportation services, adult day health care and everything else, you put it all together, its still so much less expensive than most assisted living or skilled nursing facilities.

I think theres significant, increasing interest. But from an M&A standpoint, adult day does have those real challenges I talked about. Additionally, the largest provider of adult day services has about 112 locations throughout the U.S. and thats less than 1% of market share. So that fragmentation is a downside for those looking for a large investment opportunity. Still, that means the industry is ripe for consolidation.

Many adult day centers throughout the United States are still in the first round of ownership and are privately owned probably family-owned. Many of us are aging and looking for exits.

There are lots of plans. Weve grown slowly over time and have opened two additional centers in the last four years. We plan to continue growing when opportunities present themselves. Theres room for expansion in Tennessee. Theres only about 40 providers throughout the entire state, and theres room for about double that.

Ive also had the pleasure of working as the president of the Tennessee Association of Adult Day Services, as well as working with the National Adult Day Services Association, where we have pretty significant policy efforts.

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Adult Day Industry Trending Toward For-Profit Status, 2020 Boom - Home Health Care News

The touch of a feather, the itch of a mosquito bite, the prick of a needle: The body is capable of distinguishing and responding to all of these sensations in a near instantaneous relay, from skin to brain and back again.

Our brain is constantly computing these things, and in healthy people it never gets it wrong, says Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a biologist in Penns School of Arts and Sciences.

The details that drive these processes are now at the heart of Abdus-Saboors research. Using a variety of techniques and models, he and his labestablished at Penn last yearseek to tease out the nervous system pathways involved in translating sensations to the brain, with a particular focus on acute and chronic pain.

His work has taken on a new significance in light of the opioid epidemic.

As a field we have really struggled in identifying novel pain killers, he says. This is why we have an overreliance on opioids.

Getting to the bottom of basic mechanisms in pain sensation has the potential to uncover new pathways that could be targeted with alternative medications. And with a new technique for applying a measurement to pain itself, Abdus-Saboor has in hand a platform that could be used to screen new drugs or even help clinicians one day evaluate their patients discomfort in a much more rigorous way than is currently available.

Animal behavior and biology got their hooks into Abdus-Saboor when he was a child. Growing up in Philadelphias Germantown neighborhood, he fashioned a laboratory in his home at age 14, winning a citywide science competition for his investigations of crayfish.

He carried that fascination with him through his undergrad years at North Carolina A&T State University, pursuing animal science as a pre-vet student. A summer in a laboratory at Penn refined that interest. The mysteries contained in the molecules and genes of animals began to emerge as the most captivating to Abdus-Saboor.

He wound up pursuing his graduate studies with Meera Sundaram at Penn in the Perelman School of Medicine, focusing on the genetics of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. But he made a conscious choice to shift gears as he embarked on two postdoctoral fellowships.

Thinking about running my own lab one day, I was considering which area has the biggest growth potential in biomedical research, he recalls. The brain is the last frontier; its the least well-understood organ. I thought that, if I could apply some of the tools that Id been learning in genetics and molecular biology toward the study of the nervous system, then perhaps I could make some important discoveries and look at things from a different vantage point.

First in a postdoctoral fellowship with Benjamin Shykind of Cornell University and in a second position working with Wenqin Luo back at Penn, Abdus-Saboor played catch up in the field of neuroscience.

Basically, every single approach that I worked on was new to me, he says. But I think that navet helped me.

Specifically, Abdus-Saboor started asking questions about the common techniques use to evaluate responses to sensory stimuli in mouse studies and wasnt satisfied with the answers. Certain assays, for example, relied on a binary responseeither the animals responded to a stimulus or they didnta measure that struck Abdus-Saboor as rather crude and possibly biased.

Over the last few years, as he wrapped up his postdoc with Luo and established his own lab at Penn, he set out to create a more refined scale for evaluating these types of responses. His technique relies on the use of a high-speed videography, capable of capturing 1,000 frames per second. In a paper published in August in Cell Reports, he, colleagueNathan Fried, Luo, and others reported the creation of a nuanced mouse pain scale that could effectively differentiate responses to a variety of sensory stimuli.

Taking lessons from other model systems, mainly fruit flies and zebrafish, people have been using high-speed cameras to slow down behaviors that we cant see with the naked eye, says Abdus-Saboor. I had the hypothesis that if we did this, maybe there was a lot more information we could extract that could inform us and teach us about what the animal is experiencing. And that turned out to be the case.

Processing frames from these recordings manually, which is how the researchers initially completed the study, was a tedious task. But working with biostatisticians, computational biologists, and machine-learning specialists, Abdus-Saboor and members of his lab were able to streamline the process, and, in collaboration with departmental colleague Joshua Plotkin, are working to automate the video frame-by-frame analysis.

We want others to easily adopt this technology, and automation would help avoid the potential error and variability of human scoring, he says. There are emerging technologies that are allowing us to do this.

So far, theyve tested the platform using both male and female mice representing a variety genetic types and have gotten consistent results across the board.

As his lab has developed this technology, theyve been working in parallel to more deeply understand the nervous system circuits that produce the sensation of pain, especially in the context of chronic pain. People who suffer from chronic pain become more sensitive to various types of touch, even an otherwise innocuous application of warmth or pressure.

This is the chronic pain we hear a lot about now, in this opioid epidemic era, Abdus-Saboor says.

In his relatively short time as a faculty member, hes already struck up collaborations with researchers working on pain elsewhere in the University to advance the science of treating pain. In the School of Dental Medicine, he and Claire Mitchell have worked together on a study of dental pain. Abdus-Saboor has also had productive conversations with researchers, such as Penn Dental Medicines Elliot Hersh, who are interested in applying his high-speed camera platform in clinical settings to objectively evaluate the patients pain and prescribe painkilling drugs appropriately.

Were not there yet, but these are conversations were starting to have, says Abdus-Saboor. If this technology could evolve into the clinic? That would be a wonderful thing.

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvanias School of Arts and Sciences.

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The science of sensations - Penn: Office of University Communications

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bionano Genomics, Inc. (NASDAQ: BNGO), a life sciences instrumentation company that develops and markets Saphyr, a platform for ultra-sensitive and ultra-specific structural variation detection in genome analysis, today announced the key takeaways from presentations given between October 15-19 by scientists from top institutes and diagnostic companies at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting and at Bionanos satellite educational event in Houston, TX.

At ASHG and at the satellite education event held prior to the conference and organized by Bionano, clinicians and researchers using the Saphyr system to analyze samples from patients with genetic diseases and cancer presented a series of new findings and validation results that support the adoption of Saphyr as a complement to next-generation sequencing for variant discovery and as a replacement for traditional cytogenetic methods in variant detection for clinical applications.

Alka Chaubey, Ph.D., Head of Cytogenomics at PerkinElmer Genomics summarized the validation of Saphyr technology by PerkinElmer that enabled the development of PerkinElmers assay for Facioscapulohumeral Dystrophy (FSHD), which PerkinElmer and the University of Iowa developed based on the Bionano EnFocus FSHD Analysis tool. Dr. Chaubey presented 100% concordance between the assay and known disease state for publicly available cell lines, and 100% reproducibility among all runs and all FSHD patient samples at multiple test sites and with multiple operators.

Joe Devaney, Ph.D., Associate Director of R&D of diagnostic company GeneDx presented a Saphyr validation study for the detection of the disease-causing variants in FSHD and repeat expansion disorders such as Mytonic Dystrophy 1 and 2. For the 40 samples genotyped for the contraction causing FSHD and the 36 samples genotyped for CNBP gene expansion that causes Mytonic Dystrophy 2, the results generated with Saphyr had a sensitivity, specificity and Positive Predictive Value of 100%.

Dr. Gokce Toruner from the MD Anderson Cancer Center demonstrated 100% concordance between data generated with Saphyr and structural variant data generated with gold standard cytogenetic methods in five bone marrow specimens with hematological malignancies. All previously identified cytogenetic abnormalities detected by karyotyping, FISH or microarray analysis were detected by Saphyr. In addition, several novel structural and copy number changes were detected.

Professor Mark Ebbert from the Mayo Clinic used Saphyr to resolve challenging genomic regions implicated in neurodegenerative diseases on 31 brain samples collected post-mortem from patients with ALS, Parkinsons disease, and Alzheimers disease. One of the causes of ALS is an expansion of a repeat in a gene called C9orf72. While no technology commonly used today for genome analysis has been capable of spanning and measuring the larger repeat expansions of this gene, Dr. Ebbert was able to use the Saphyr system to size a range of expansions from a single brain biopsy, demonstrating a full continuum of mosaicism. In patients with Parkinsons disease, Saphyr resolved the structure of an inverted triplication of an associated gene. In patients with Alzheimers disease, Saphyr detected structural variants in CR1, an important gene with a repeat structure that cannot be fully analyzed with next-generation sequencing, and detected inversions in the Tau gene that protect against the disease.

Frances High, MD., Ph.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital for Children at Harvard University presented results of a study on 19 samples from patients with Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH), a common and severe structural birth defect that leads to malformation for the developing lungs. Using data from the Saphyr system, Dr. Highs team confirmed all high-confidence structural variants that were detected by cytogenetic methods, provided additional higher-resolution detail and elucidated the structure of several, and identified novel likely causative variants. Dr. High announced an upcoming larger study of 50 patient-parent trios, or 150 samples total, to identify novel structural variants that are causative for this disease.

Professor Jennifer Mulle from Emory University School of Medicine used the Saphyr system to study a genetic syndrome characterized by intellectual disability, autism and a 40-fold increased risk for schizophrenia. She identified a high degree of previously undocumented structural variation in the disease region, identified a new gene previously not known to be involved in the disease, and was able to develop a new hypothesis about the disease mechanism from the data generated by Saphyr.

Professors Eric Vilain and Hayk Barseghyan from the George Washington University and Childrens National Medical Center presented a number of cases from the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, patients with Disorders of Sex Development, Gitelmans Syndrome, FSHD and Beckwith-Wiedeman syndrome where Bionano was able to provide a molecular diagnosis, identify new likely causative genes, or identify structural variants affecting known or expected disease genes.

Other talks included those by Professor Claudia Carvalho of Baylor College of Medicine, who used data from the Saphyr system to analyze repeat-mediated inversions, which are complex genomic structures that are hard or impossible to resolve with other molecular methods but can predispose to genetic disease; Tina Graves-Lindsay from the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University, who corrected structural errors in the official human reference genomes with data generated with Saphyr; and Amir Trabelsi, CEO of Genoox, who announced the new release of a software pipeline that now automatically validates, annotates and classifies Bionano translocation calls from whole genome sequence data.

Erik Holmlin, Ph.D., CEO of Bionano, commented, The quality of the studies presented and wide variety of applications for Saphyr in genetic disease and cancer research is continuing to increase. Data generated by the Saphyr system are answering difficult questions in complex genetic diseases that have been historically very challenging according to each of the presenters who described their experiences with Saphyr. The validation studies for FSHD, repeat expansion disorders and hematological malignancies are setting the stage for Saphyr to become a routine tool in research and clinical settings. We are grateful to all our customers and collaborators for their inspiration and for their work in showing what Saphyr can do.

More information about Bionano Genomics is available at http://www.bionanogenomics.com.

About Bionano GenomicsBionano is a life sciences instrumentation company in the genome analysis space. Bionano develops and markets the Saphyr system, a platform for ultra-sensitive and ultra-specific structural variation detection that enables researchers and clinicians to accelerate the search for new diagnostics and therapeutic targets and to drive the adoption of digital cytogenetics, which is designed to be a more systematic, streamlined and industrialized form of traditional cytogenetics. The Saphyr system comprises an instrument, chip consumables, reagents and a suite of data analysis tools.

Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as may, will, expect, plan, anticipate, estimate, intend and similar expressions (as well as other words or expressions referencing future events, conditions or circumstances) convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes and are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding our intentions, beliefs, projections, outlook, analyses or current expectations concerning, including among other things, adoption of Saphyr as a routine tool in research and clinical settings and the effectiveness and utility of the Saphyr system in such settings. Each of these forward-looking statements involves risks and uncertainties. Actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected or implied in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference include the risks that our sales, revenue, expense and other financial guidance may not be as expected, as well as risks and uncertainties associated with general market conditions; changes in the competitive landscape and the introduction of competitive products; changes in our strategic and commercial plans; our ability to obtain sufficient financing to fund our strategic plans and commercialization efforts; the ability of key clinical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our products; the loss of key members of management and our commercial team; and the risks and uncertainties associated with our business and financial condition in general, including the risks and uncertainties described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018 and in other filings subsequently made by us with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date on which they were made and are based on management's assumptions and estimates as of such date. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of the receipt of new information, the occurrence of future events or otherwise.

Contacts

Company Contact:Mike Ward, CFOBionano Genomics, Inc. +1 (858) 888-7600mward@bionanogenomics.com

Investor Relations Contact:Ashley R. RobinsonLifeSci Advisors, LLC+1 (617) 775-5956arr@lifesciadvisors.com

Media Contact:Kirsten ThomasThe Ruth Group+1 (508) 280-6592kthomas@theruthgroup.com

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Takeaways from ASHG 2019 in Houston: Users of Bionano's Saphyr System Presented Validation Results for FSHD, Repeat Expansion Disorders and Digital...

Have you ever wondered why you wash your rice or soak it overnight before cooking it? Perhaps you wash your rice grains to enhance taste, reduce starch levels, or maybe that's just the way your family has always prepped rice. Thanks to a tip from science communicator Samantha Yammine who came across Dr. Nausheen Sadiq's neat finding while live-tweeting a forum on Diversity and Excellence in Science it turns out there is another reason why, as washing rice actually helps reduce the concentration of heavy metals, like chromium, cadmium, arsenic, and lead.

Heavy metal contamination in crops can be caused by human activities, such as mining, fertilizers, pesticides, and sewage sludge. Compared to most cereal crops though, rice (Oryza sativa L.) actually accumulates more heavy materials, like cadmium or arsenic, where long-term heavy metal intake can cause health risks. For example, long-term arsenic exposure leads to skin disease, high blood pressure, and neurological effects. This is especially important to consider as rice is a staple food across the globe.

Heavy metal contamination in crops can be caused by human activities, such as mining, fertilizers, pesticides, and sewage sludge.

Photo by TUAN ANH TRAN on Unsplash

In a recent study, researchers investigated the effects of different cooking methods (normal, high-pressure and microwave cooking) on the concentration, bio-accessibility and health risks posed by three heavy metals (cadmium, arsenic and lead) in two strains of brown rice. After cooking 100 grams of brown rice grains, researchers evaluated bioaccessibility (i.e. how much of the heavy metal is released for absorption) by mixing rice samples with simulated gastric fluid, and then used spectrometery to measure heavy metal concentration. Lastly, the researchers calculated the health risk posed by the heavy metals by calculating values such as the average daily dose.

Overall, the researchers found that instead of the three different cooking methods, it was the washing process which significantly reduced concentrations of cadmium, arsenic and lead, suggesting that the reduction may be due to rice morphology. For example, lead is found largely in the outer compartments of rice kernels, so lead is more likely to be removed during rice washing.

In contrast, the three cooking methods did impact bioaccessibility i.e. how much of the heavy metal would be released for absorption by the body. Here, washing and soaking isn't enough as rice absorbs water poorly at 25C. This finding was also reflected in calculated values: the average daily doses of cadmium, arsenic and lead were lower in washed and cooked rice, compared to raw rice.

It's worth noting that the European Commission has enforced limits on heavy metal levels - for example, arsenic is currently limited to 200 parts per billion (ppb) for adults and 100 ppb for infants. Both the U.S. and Canada currently have no limits in place for arsenic in food though Canada is currently reviewing a proposal to add maximum levels for arsenic found in white and brown rice, while the U.S. FDA has previously released a (non-binding) risk assessment, suggesting the same 100 ppb levels as Europe.

So the takeaway here is that yes, your family and all those professional chefs have been right all along. Yes, washing rice involves sacrificing some of its nutritional value, but doing so means you can reduce the levels of heavy metals present in grains, and still enjoy dishes like rice cakes. And returning back to Yammine's reporting, Saudiq actually shared that by soaking and washing rice for ~5 mins, you can get rid of 50-100% of these elements. (Thanks Sam!)

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Scientists have created the first-ever 18-carbon ring, a major feat of molecular architecture - Massive Science

Its like the parable about the blindfolded men and the elephantonly instead of an elephant, its an enzyme.

For decades, researchers have groped at a family of proteins called Rafs. These proteinsincluding A-Raf, B-Raf and C-Raftransmit signals that control proliferation, differentiation and survival in every cell in the body.

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Raf proteins, especially B-Raf, are also well-known cancer drivers. Hence Rafs full name: rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma. Faulty control of their activity can cause melanoma; thyroid, colorectal, non-small cell lung and pediatric brain cancers; and other malignancies. Two FDA-approved drugs treat cancer by inhibiting B-Raf.

Given B-Rafs critical roles in health and disease, scientists have been keen to understand its structure. Theyve used genetics, chemistry, biology and other scientific approaches, but they havent been able to piece together a complete picture of Raf.

People had poked and prodded Raf for more than 30 years, but we could only see parts of it, saidMichael J. Eck, professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Now, thanks to work by Eck and colleagues, researchers can see the whole enzyme.

As reported online this month inNature, Ecks team at last captured high-resolution images of B-Raf in its inactive or off state and in several active or on positions.

The findings clarify how B-Raf functions normally in the body as well as what happens when mutations alter its shape and lead to cancer.

The work should help researchers seeking to develop safer, more effective cancer drugs that lock onto particular forms of the enzyme like custom-made puzzle pieces.

Illuminating the huge, unsolved problem of B-Rafs structure could have major importance for understanding its biology and for drug discovery, said Eck.

Its exciting to see something no one has seen before, he added. Now that we can look at the thing, we can tell a coherent story that integrates many previous studies.

Protein whisperer

Several factors made the discovery possible.

First, Ecks team didnt try to study B-Raf alone but instead prepared it as a complex with two additional proteins: a known regulator of Raf with the catchy name of 14-3-3, plus MEK, the next link in the Raf signaling chain.

MEK was the crucial missing piece for solving the structure, said Eck, who is co-senior author of the study along withHyesung Jeon, research associate at HMS and a senior scientist at Dana-Farber. MEK is not just the next step in the signaling cascade, its also key for keeping Raf turned off.

Second, HMS research associateEunyoung Park, a senior scientist in the Eck Lab and first author of the study, served as a protein whisperer who tamed B-Raf, coaxing it into those well-behaved complexes with 14-3-3 and MEK, said Eck.

Third, researchers hadnt been able to determine B-Rafs structure using traditional methods such as X-ray crystallography. Advances incryo-electron microscopy, which visualizes molecules at near-atomic resolution, finally opened the door.

The Raf that rocks the cradle

At long last, the structures revealed themselves.

Like a snowman with a rocker base, the complex in its inactive or off state includes MEK on top, B-Raf in the middle and 14-3-3 on the bottom, cradle-shaped.

The team showed how 14-3-3 normally blocks B-Raf from binding with other B-Rafs, keeping it shut off as a default. When an incoming cell signal calls B-Raf to action, however, 14-3-3 swings aside and allows two B-Raf/MEK complexes to form a pair.

In doing so, 14-3-3 exposes a region of B-Raf that draws the complex to the cell membrane. There, B-Raf gets activated and in turn activates and releases MEK to send its growth-promoting signal.

The structural snapshots also revealed how mutations subvert this normal activation process by causing the B-Raf switch to get stuck in the on position.

The discovery isnt without precedent in the cancer biology world.

Weve seen this in other cancer-causing enzymes weve studied, said Eck.

The results could lead to improved treatments for people with cancers driven by dysfunctional B-Raf.

Current drugs that target mutated B-Raf are used to treat malignant melanoma, but they sometimes also stimulate the growth of new skin cancers by paradoxically activating the normal form of the enzyme. Patients then need to take a second drug, which can cause serious side effects.

The structure gives us ideas about new approaches for drug discovery, said Eck.

His group also plans to uncover more details about B-Raf activation in both healthy cells and cancers.

Funding and authorship

Additional coauthors are Shaun Rawson, Kunhua Li, Byeong-Won Kim, Scott Ficarro, Gonzalo Gonzalez-Del Pino, Humayun Sharif and Jarrod Marto.

This work was supported in part by the PLGA fund at the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and the National Institutes of Health (grants P50CA165962, P01CA154303 and R50CA221830). Cryo-EM imaging was carried out at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Cryo-EM Core Facility and theHarvard Cryo-EM Center for Structural Biology.

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Caught in the Act - Harvard Medical School

Interpace hosts 2nd Annual Fellow Programs

PARSIPPANY, NJ, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Interpace (IDXG) announced today that it will be presenting new data on the performance of its molecular thyroid and GI products at an industry known scientific international meeting. The American College of Gastroenterology annual meeting is held on October 27-30 in San Antonio, Texas and is one of the largest gatherings of gastroenterologists and endoscopists. These are two key targets for Interpaces PancraGEN test for early detection of cancer in indeterminate pancreatic cysts, solid lesions, and biliary structures. The PancraGEN publication entitled Serial molecular testing of pancreatic cyst fluid over time: progression and regression highlights the Companys unique clinical and molecular database of patient results, examining 2,167 patients with pancreatic cysts that underwent multiple PancraGEN tests over time. The results support the high negative predictive value of PancraGEN, showing that the majority of cases (92%) initially found to have low risk PancraGEN results remained low risk at follow-up. The small portion of patients that did progress only progressed to moderate risk levels, where risk most often regressed to low risk over time.

In addition to the poster, Interpace will host its second annual Fellows program. The keynote speakers will be Dr. Tamas Gonda, Columbia University, and Dr. James Farrell, Yale University. Dr.s Gonda and Farrell are going to be discussing their peer-reviewed published work on the utility of DNA analysis in managing patients with pancreatic cysts, describing molecular results of patients who have undergone PancraGEN testing and how those results can be used to impact patient management decisions.

About Interpace

Interpace is a leader in enabling personalized medicine, offering specialized services along the therapeutic value chain from early diagnosis and prognostic planning to targeted therapeutic applications.

Interpaces Diagnostic Business is a fully integrated commercial and bioinformatics business unit that provides clinically useful molecular diagnostic tests, bioinformatics and pathology services for evaluating risk of cancer by leveraging the latest technology in personalized medicine for improved patient diagnosis and management. Interpace has four commercialized molecular tests and one test in a clinical evaluation process (CEP): PancraGEN for the diagnosis and prognosis of pancreatic cancer from pancreatic cysts; ThyGeNEXT for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer from thyroid nodules utilizing a next generation sequencing assay; ThyraMIR for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer from thyroid nodules utilizing a proprietary gene expression assay; and RespriDX that differentiates lung cancer of primary vs. metastatic origin. In addition, BarreGEN for Barretts Esophagus, is currently in a clinical evaluation program whereby we gather information from physicians using BarreGEN to assist us in positioning the product for full launch, partnering and potentially supporting reimbursement with payers.

Interpaces Biopharma Business provides pharmacogenomics testing, genotyping, biorepository and other customized services to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The Biopharma Business also advances personalized medicine by partnering with pharmaceutical, academic, and technology leaders to effectively integrate pharmacogenomics into their drug development and clinical trial programs with the goals of delivering safer, more effective drugs to market more quickly, and improving patient care.

For more information, please visit Interpaces website at http://www.interpacediagnostics.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, relating to the Company's future financial and operating performance. The Company has attempted to identify forward looking statements by terminology including "believes," "estimates," "anticipates," "expects," "plans," "projects," "intends," "potential," "may," "could," "might," "will," "should," "approximately" or other words that convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, assumptions and uncertainties involving judgments about, among other things, future economic, competitive and market conditions and future business decisions, all of which are difficult or impossible to predict accurately and many of which are beyond the Company's control. These statements also involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any forward-looking statement. Known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to the fact that there is no assurance the acquisition of the BioPharma business of Cancer Genetics, Inc. will be successfully integrated with the Company, or that the potential benefits of the acquisition, including future revenues, will be successfully realized. Additionally, all forward-looking statements are subject to the Risk Factors detailed from time to time in the Company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, Current Reports on Form 8-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Because of these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions, undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. In addition, these statements speak only as of the date of this press release and, except as may be required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

CONTACTS:Investor Relations - Edison GroupJoseph Green(646) 653-7030jgreen@edisongroup.com

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Interpace to Present at the American College of Gastroenterology Conference - GlobeNewswire

The latest research Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market both qualitative and quantitative data analysis to present an overview of the future adjacency around Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market for the forecast period, 2019-2024. The Clinical Trial Consumables Markets growth and developments are studied and a detailed overview is been given.

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The report aims to provide an overview of Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market with detailed market segmentation by Type, Delivery Method, Application and geography. The global Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.

Top Companies are covering this Report:-Myriad Genetics, Cepheid, Illumina Inc., Abbott, Agilent , Technologies Inc., Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., GenePOC Inc., QIAGEN and more

This market research is an intelligence report with meticulous efforts undertaken to study the right and valuable information. Regulatory scenarios that affect the various decisions in the Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market are given a keen observation and have been explained.

Market Segment by Type, coversAssays and KitsInstruments or AnalyzersServices and Software

Market Segment by Applications, can be divided intoRespiratory DiseasesSexually Transmitted DiseasesHospital-acquired InfectionOncologyHepatitisOthers

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Table Of Content:

1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.5 Market by Application1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered

2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market Size2.2 Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Growth Trends by Regions2.3 Industry Trends

3 Market Share by Key Players3.1 Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market Size by Manufacturers3.2 Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Key Players Head office and Area Served3.3 Key Players Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Product/Solution/Service3.4 Date of Enter into Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market3.5 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion Plans

4 Breakdown Data by Product4.1 Global Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Sales by Product4.2 Global Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Revenue by Product4.3 Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Price by Product

5 Breakdown Data by End User5.1 Overview5.2 Global Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Breakdown Data by End User

Continued.

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Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market by 2024 with Latest innovative report top key players Myriad Genetics, Cepheid, Illumina, Abbott, Agilent...