January 2017

This is one of the key focus areas for Forentis and our companies. A recent article in Med Device Online provides an overview of where we are at and where we are headed.

In the absence of vaccine, or a magic bullet drug that could cure any type of cancer, there is a need to focus on early diagnosis of cancer, which is the single most important – and often untapped – tool for success available to medical science in its fight against cancer.

Opportunities in this area are widely understood and discussed, particularly with regard to their cost, speed, accuracy, and potential for minimal invasion. Cancer diagnosis is a rapidly evolving field that openly accepts new technologies if they show clear improvement over established norms.

Read the entire article here.

In this excellent article in Wired magazine, a new approach to assessing concussion risks may lead to more comprehensive and accurate determinations of head injury severity. The possibilities in biomarker discovery are virtually unlimited!

Scientists may have discovered a blood test for concussions, more sensitive and less biased than any human evaluator. When axons in the brain get damaged, they release a number of proteins into the cerebral spinal fluid. About one in a thousand of those proteins crosses the blood-brain barrier to enter the bloodstream. The more damage, the higher the blood protein concentration. The proteins are just hard to find.

“It’s like trying to find grains of sand in a thousand Olympic-size swimming pools,” says Jessica Gill, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who studies brain trauma and PTSD in soldiers.

Check out the entire article here.

A multicenter study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins University just reported on a full genomic analysis of tumor samples from a small number of people who died of pancreatic cancer. The new data suggests that epigenetic changes control how DNA operates to confer survival advantages on subsets of pancreatic cancer cells.

“Changes in genes’ regulation—not in the DNA sequence of genes themselves—were the driving force behind successful metastases in our experiments, and, as far as we know, this is the first genome-wide experimental evidence for this phenomenon.”

Read more at GEN