Discover the Science of Health
Scientists have found that cancer patients produce antibodies that target abnormal glycoproteins (proteins with sugar molecules attached) made by their tumors. The result of this work suggests that antitumor antibodies in the blood may provide a fruitful source of sensitive biomarkers for cancer detection. The study, supported in part by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, appears in the Feb. 15, 2010 issue of the journal Cancer Research.
African-Americans continue to bear the largest and most disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States. While black men and women made up 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2007, they accounted for more than half of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses that year and nearly half of all Americans living with HIV/AIDS. For black women ages 35 to 44, HIV was the third leading cause of death in 2006. In our nation’s capital, whose HIV/AIDS epidemic is among the worst in the United States, 6.5 percent of black men are living with the virus — a percentage higher than that of any other racial, ethnic or gender group in the city, and higher than in many countries in Africa.
An experimental vaccine developed using non-infectious virus-like particles (VLP) has protected macaques and mice against chikungunya virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that has infected millions of people in Africa and Asia and causes debilitating pain, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found. Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) developed the vaccine because there is no vaccine or treatment for chikungunya virus infection.
NewsScan #65 includes summaries of eight NIDA-funded scientific studies on a variety of topics, including school responses to suspicionless random drug testing, effects of targeting the brain’s dopamine D3 receptor, how glutamate transmissions eliminates cocaine-induced place preference in rats, how men with AAS dependence have prevalence of opioid dependence, benzotropine analogs reduces cocaine self-administration in rats, new database for addiction-related genes, injection drug users in Mexico have latent TB infection and how drug combinations contribute to HIV risk in gay/bisexual men.
