Pemgarda, available in the coming weeks, is intended for immunocompromised people who are unlikely to mount an adequate response after vaccination.The Food and Drug Administration has greenlit a new medicine to protect some of the people most at risk from Covid.The agency granted emergency use authorization for Pemgarda, a monoclonal antibody infusion, in immunocompromised people ages 12 and older. The drug is intended to protect against Covid for people who are not likely to mount an adequate immune response after vaccination. This includes those who have received stem cell or organ transplants and cancer patients taking medications that suppress the immune system.“It’s going to be for a very small section of Americans,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist who is now the chief science officer for eMed, a telehealth company. But, he said, it’s a vital group to protect: the people who most feel left behind at this stage in the pandemic.“For people who are immunocompromised and literally defenseless because their immune system doesn’t really work, this is really an important development,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System.Pemgarda will become available within the next week or two, said David Hering, the chief executive of Invivyd, the company that makes it. The company is still evaluating what the drug will cost, Mr. Hering said; he expects that Medicare and private insurance plans will cover it.The drug is given as an infusion in doctors’ offices and other health care settings; it takes about an hour to complete the infusion. The most common side effects in a clinical trial included reactions at the infusion site, cold and flulike illness, fatigue, headaches and nausea. Four out of 623 participants in the trial experienced anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt and Kiel University have developed a novel sensor for the detection of bacteria. It is based on a chip with an innovative surface coating. This ensures that only very specific microorganisms adhere to the sensor — such as certain pathogens. The larger the number of organisms, the stronger the electric signal generated by the chip. In this way, the sensor is able not only to detect dangerous bacteria with a high level of sensitivity but also to determine their concentration.
Each year, bacterial infections claim several million lives worldwide. That is why detecting harmful microorganisms is crucial — not only in the diagnosis of diseases but also, for example, in food production. However, the methods available so far are often time-consuming, require expensive equipment or can only be used by specialists. Moreover, they are often unable to distinguish between active bacteria and their decay products.
By contrast, the newly developed method detects only intact bacteria. It makes use of the fact that microorganisms only ever attack certain body cells, which they recognize from the latter’s specific sugar molecule structure. This matrix, known as the glycocalyx, differs depending on the type of cell. It serves, so to speak, as an identifier for the body cells. This means that to capture a specific bacterium, we need only to know the recognizable structure in the glycocalyx of its preferred host cell and then use this as “bait.”
This is precisely what the researchers have done. “In our study, we wanted to detect a specific strain of the gut bacterium Escherichia coli — or E. coli for short,” explains Professor Andreas Terfort from the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at Goethe University Frankfurt. “We knew which cells the pathogen usually infects. We used this to coat our chip with an artificial glycocalyx that mimics the surface of these host cells. In this way, only bacteria from the targeted E. coli strain adhere to the sensor.”
E. coli has many short arms, known as pili, which the bacterium uses to recognize its host’s glycocalyx and cling onto it. “The bacteria use their pili to bind to the sensor in several places, which allows them to hang on particularly well,” says Terfort. In addition, the chemical structure of the artificial glycocalyx is such that microbes without the right arms slide off it — like an egg off a well-greased frying pan. This ensures that indeed only the pathogenic E. coli bacteria are retained.
But how were the scientists able to corroborate that bacteria really were attached to the artificial glycocalyx? “We bonded the sugar molecules to a conductive polymer,” explains Sebastian Balser, a doctoral researcher under Professor Terfort and the first author of the paper. “By applying an electrical voltage via these ‘wires’, we are able to read how many bacteria had bonded to the sensor.”
The study documents how effective this is: The researchers mixed pathogens from the targeted E. coli strain among harmless E. coli bacteria in various concentrations. “Our sensor was able to detect the harmful microorganisms even in very small quantities,” explains Terfort. “What’s more, the higher the concentration of the targeted bacteria, the stronger the emitted signals.”
The paper is initial proof that the method works. In the next step, the involved working groups want to investigate whether it also stands the test in practice. Using it in regions where there are no hospitals with sophisticated lab diagnostics is conceivable, for example.

People continuously exposed to bright, artificial light at night may be at increased risk of developing conditions that affect blood flow to the brain and having a stroke, according to research published today in Stroke, the peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.
Bright, outdoor lights are used at night to enhance the visibility of the environment, improving human safety and comfort. However, the excessive use of artificial light has resulted in about 80% of the world’s population living in light-polluted environments, according to the study’s authors.
While previous studies have linked increased exposure to bright, artificial light at night to the development of cardiovascular disease, this is one of the first studies to explore the relationship between exposure to light pollution at night and the potential risk to brain health and stroke.
“Despite significant advances in reducing traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, it is important to consider environmental factors in our efforts to decrease the global burden of cardiovascular disease,” said one of the corresponding authors Jian-Bing Wang, Ph.D., a researcher in the department of public health and department of endocrinology of the Children’s Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine and the National Clinical Research Center for Children’s Health in Hangzhou, China.
In a review of 28,302 adults living in China, exposure to residential outdoor nighttime light was assessed by satellite images that mapped light pollution. Cases of stroke were confirmed by hospital medical records and death certificates.
The analysis of data including six years of follow-up with participants found: 1,278 people developed cerebrovascular disease, including 777 ischemic (clot-caused) stroke cases and 133 hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke cases. People with the highest levels of exposure to outdoor light at night had a 43% increased risk of developing cerebrovascular disease compared to those with the lowest levels of exposure. People with the highest levels of exposure to particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5 is primarily emissions from combustion of gasoline, oil, diesel fuel or wood) had a 41% increased risk of developing cerebrovascular disease compared to participants with the lowest levels of exposure to PM2.5. Participants with the highest levels of exposure to PM10 (PM10 is primarily from dust and smoke) had a 50% increased risk of developing cerebrovascular disease compared to those with the lowest exposure to PM10. Participants with the highest exposure to nitrogen oxide (emissions from cars, trucks and buses, power plants and off-road equipment) had a 31% higher risk of developing cerebrovascular disease compared to those with the lowest exposure.Of note, an additional analysis that included both outdoor light at night and pollution found that the associations with increased risk of cerebrovascular disease persisted, except for ischemic stroke.

“Our study suggests that higher levels of exposure to outdoor artificial light at night may be a risk factor for cerebrovascular disease,” Wang said. “Therefore, we advise people, especially those living in urban areas, to consider reducing that exposure to protect themselves from its potential harmful impact.”
Artificial sources of light include fluorescent, incandescent and LED light sources. Continuous exposure to these light sources at night can suppress melatonin production, a hormone that promotes sleep. This can disrupt the 24-hour internal clock in people and impair sleep. People with poor sleep, compared to good sleepers, are more likely to experience worse cardiovascular health over time, according to the study. The American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 includes healthy sleep as one of the eight healthy lifestyle behaviors and health measures that drive optimal cardiovascular health.
“We need to develop more effective policies and prevention strategies to reduce the burden of disease from environmental factors such as light as well as air pollution, particularly for people living in the most densely populated, polluted areas around the world,” Wang said.
Study background and details: The analysis was conducted from 2015 to 2021 and included adults without cardiovascular disease who lived in Ningbo, a major port and industrial city on China’s east coast, with a population of more than 8.2 million people according to the 2020 Chinese national census. The average age of study participants was 62 years and about 60% were women. Participants were enrolled from 2015-2018 and followed for up to six years for cerebrovascular disease, ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. People with unavailable addresses or error records, missing covariate data (data not included in the original study that might alter outcomes), extreme levels of exposure to outdoor light at night, previously diagnosed with cerebrovascular disease at enrollment and within 1 year after enrollment were excluded from the analysis.There were several limitations to the study, including that it did not obtain data on indoor lighting products and shading measures such as blackout curtains used by participants during nighttime. Additionally, satellite-based products rarely capture blue light sources, which may lead to an underestimated association between outdoor light at night and cerebrovascular disease; and the population studied was from one city in China, therefore the findings may not apply to people in other communities with different exposure to outdoor light at night. Larger prospective studies are needed to confirm these findings.

GPT-4 can accurately interpret types of cells important for the analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing — a sequencing process fundamental to interpreting cell types — with high consistency to that of time-consuming manual annotation by human experts of gene information, according to a study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The findings are published in the journal Nature Methods.
GPT-4 is a large language model designed for speech understanding and generation. Upon assessment across numerous tissue and cell types, GPT-4 has demonstrated the ability to produce cell type annotations that closely align with manual annotations of human experts and surpass existing automatic algorithms. This feature has the potential to significantly lessen the amount of effort and expertise needed for annotating cell types, a process that can take months. Moreover, the researchers have developed GPTCelltype, an R software package, to facilitate the automated annotation of cell types using GPT-4.
“The process of annotating cell types for single cells is often time-consuming, requiring human experts to compare genes across cell clusters,” said Wenpin Hou, PhD, assistant professor of Biostatistics at Columbia Mailman School. “Although automated cell type annotation methods have been developed, manual methods to interpret scientific data remain widely used, and such a process can take weeks to months. We hypothesized that GPT-4 can accurately annotate cell types, transitioning the process from manual to a semi- or even fully automated procedure and be cost-efficient and seamless.”
The researchers assessed GPT-4’s performance across ten datasets covering five species, hundreds of tissue and cell types, and including both normal and cancer samples. GPT-4 was queried using GPTCelltype, the software tool developed by the researchers. For competing purposes, they also evaluated other GPT versions and manual methods as a reference tool.
As a first step, the researchers first explored the various factors that may affect the annotation accuracy of GPT-4. They found that GPT-4 performs best when using the top 10 different genes and exhibits similar accuracy across various prompt strategies, including a basic prompt strategy, a chain-of-thought-inspired prompt strategy that includes reasoning steps, and a repeated prompt strategy. GPT-4 matched manual analyses in over 75 percent of cell types in most studies and tissues demonstrating its competency in generating expert-comparable cell type annotations. In addition, the low agreement between GPT-4 and manual annotations in some cell types does not necessarily imply that GPT-4’s annotation is incorrect. In an example of stromal or connective tissue cells, GPT-4 provides more accurate cell type annotations. GPT-4 was also notably faster.
Hou and her colleague also assessed GPT-4’s robustness in complex real data scenarios and found that GPT-4 can distinguish between pure and mixed cell types with 93 percent accuracy, and differentiated between known and unknown cell types with 99 percent accuracy. They also evaluated the performance of reproducing GPT-4’s methods using prior simulation studies. GPT-4 generated identical notations for the same marker genes in 85 percent of cases. “All of these results demonstrate GPT-4’s robustness in various scenarios,” observed Hou.
While GPT-4 surpasses existing methods, there are limitations to consider, according to Hou, including the challenges for verifying GPT-4’s quality and reliability because it discloses little about its training proceedings.
“Since our study focuses on the standard version of GPT-4, fine-tuning GPT-4 could further improve cell type annotation performance,” said Hou.
Zhicheng Ji of Duke University School of Medicine is a co-author.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grant U54AG075936 and R35GM150887.

What could cancer teach us about tuberculosis? That’s a question Meenal Datta has been chasing since she was a graduate student.
Once the body’s immune system is infected with tuberculosis, it forms granulomas — tight clusters of white blood cells — in an attempt to wall off the infection-causing bacteria in the lungs. But more often than not, granulomas do more harm than good.
Charged with analyzing the similarities between granulomas and tumors, Datta discovered that both are structurally and functionally abnormal. In 2015, she and other researchers looked at the vascular structures of granulomas and showed that they are compromised and leaky just like tumor blood vessels, which limits drug delivery and successful treatment in both diseases.
“It was the first time we showed definitively that there was this pathophysiological similarity between these two diseases that present with different causes and symptoms,” said Datta, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame. “Cancer doesn’t sound anything like an infectious disease. And yet, here are two different diseases with the same problem of dysfunctional blood vessels.”
Now a study from the same team at the University of Notre Dame, Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health has identified a combination of medications that may improve blood flow within granulomas, benefiting drug delivery. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study leverages decades of cancer research to study tuberculosis-affected lung tissue and improve treatment.
“Much like in tumors, many of the blood vessels in granulomas are compressed or squeezed shut — just like if you stepped on your garden hose,” said Datta, the first author on the study. “In cancer, we know that happens because of the growing tumor mass and the supportive protein scaffolding it puts down, called matrix. We thought maybe the same thing was happening in tuberculosis.”
The study confirmed that a similar phenomenon is occurring in granulomas — too much cell mass and protein scaffolding. This impaired function makes blood flow through blood vessels nearly impossible, crippling the ability to get a medication to the tuberculosis disease site.

Datta and her collaborators used losartan, an affordable drug used to treat high blood pressure. However, it also has the beneficial side effect of reducing the amount of matrix being created inside a granuloma, thus opening the compressed blood vessels and restoring blood flow.
Researchers then combined losartan with bevacizumab, a drug used by cancer patients to stop the overproduction of poorly formed blood vessels. With this two-pronged medicinal approach, Datta and the team were able to make the granuloma blood vessels function and behave more normally.
When the researchers applied the host-directed therapies losartan and bevacizumab along with antibiotics, they showed improved drug delivery and antibiotic concentration within granulomas.
Additionally, Datta’s graduate student Maksym Zarodniuk analyzed genome sequencing data produced by the team, and found that even without antibiotics, there was a reduction in tuberculosis bacteria within the granulomas.
“When we gave just those host-directed therapies, we were getting good treatment benefit even without adding the antibiotics. Those therapies were promoting the body’s inflammatory response to fight against the bacteria, which we did not expect,” Datta said.
For Datta, this study caps off a stretch of tuberculosis research that started when she began her doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2011, and has spanned multiple phases of her career. Tuberculosis, although largely controlled in the U.S., is still considered one of the deadliest infectious diseases worldwide.

“The advantage of the host-directed therapies we selected is that these agents or very similar drugs of the same class are already approved by regulatory agencies around the globe, and they are affordable,” Datta said. “We hope that our preclinical results will be found compelling enough to start a clinical trial to benefit tuberculosis patients.”
Today, Datta’s lab at the University of Notre Dame primarily focuses its research on understanding glioblastoma, a rare treatment-resistant brain cancer. Datta said that being an engineer allows her to cross into other areas of research and with a different perspective, making an excellent case for the importance of multidisciplinary research.
“I do believe that really is an advantage of being an engineer. It’s easier for me to sometimes make connections between contexts that seem disparate,” Datta said. “We depend on our life science and clinical colleagues to walk through those details, but engineers are very good at approaching complex problems from a simplified systems approach.”
The study, “Normalizing granuloma vasculature and matrix improves drug delivery and reduces bacterial burden in tuberculosis-infected rabbits,” was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Datta is an affiliated member of Notre Dame’s Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, Eck Institute for Global Health, Harper Cancer Research Institute, Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, NDnano and Warren Center for Drug Discovery. Datta is an assistant professor in the following doctorate programs: aerospace and mechanical engineering, bioengineering, and materials science and engineering.

A new study by researchers at UC Davis Health found human brains are getting larger. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s.
The researchers hypothesize the increased brain size may lead to an increased brain reserve, potentially reducing the overall risk of age-related dementias.
The findings were published in JAMA Neurology.
“The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,” said Charles DeCarli, first author of the study. DeCarli is a distinguished professor of neurology and director of the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “Genetics plays a major role in determining brain size, but our findings indicate external influences — such as health, social, cultural and educational factors — may also play a role.”
75-year study reveals brain changes between generations
The researchers used brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) from participants in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). The community-based study was launched in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts, to analyze patterns of cardiovascular and other diseases. The original cohort consisted of 5,209 men and women between the ages of 30 and 62. The research has continued for 75 years and now includes second and third generations of participants.
The MRIs were conducted between 1999 and 2019 with FHS participants born during the 1930s through the 1970s. The brain study consisted of 3,226 participants (53% female, 47% male) with an average age of about 57 at the time of the MRI.

The research led by UC Davis compared the MRIs of people born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s. It found gradual but consistent increases in several brain structures. For example, a measure that looked at brain volume (intracranial volume) showed steady increases decade by decade. For participants born in the 1930s, the average volume was 1,234 milliliters, but for those born in the 1970s, the volume was 1,321 milliliters, or about 6.6% greater volume.
Cortical surface area — a measure of the brain’s surface — showed an even greater increase decade by decade. Participants born in the 1970s had an average surface area of 2,104 square centimeters compared to 2,056 square centimeters for participants born in the 1930s — almost a 15% increase in volume.
The researchers found brain structures such as white matter, gray matter and hippocampus (a brain region involved in learning and memory) also increased in size when comparing participants born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s.
Larger brains may mean lower incidence of dementia
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, approximately 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease. That number is expected to rise to 11.2 million by 2040.
Although the numbers are rising with America’s aging population, the incidence of Alzheimer’s — the percentage of the population affected by the disease — is decreasing. A previous study found a 20 percent reduction in the incidence of dementia per decade since the 1970s.

Improved brain health and size may be one reason why.
“Larger brain structures like those observed in our study may reflect improved brain development and improved brain health,” DeCarli said. “A larger brain structure represents a larger brain reserve and may buffer the late-life effects of age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and related dementias.”
One of the study’s strengths is the design of the FHS study, which allows the researchers to examine brain imaging of three generations of participants with birthdates spanning almost 80 years. A limitation is that non-Hispanic white participants make up the majority of the FHS cohort, which is not representative of the U.S. population.
Additional authors: Pauline Maillard and Evan Fletcher of UC Davis; Matthew Pase of Monash University, Australia; Alexa Beiser, Daniel Kojis and Hugo Aparicio of Boston University; and Claudia Satizabal, Jayandra Himali and Sudha Seshadri of UT Health San Antonio.

Many parents struggle deciding whether their middle or high school aged child should stay home from school if they don’t feel well, a new national poll suggests.
Among top factors: how their adolescent or teen is behaving due to symptoms and if they can get through a school day, the risk that they’re contagious and whether the student will miss a test, presentation or after school activity.
One in five parents also consider if their child needs a mental health day, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health.
“In some cases, the decision to keep kids home from school is clear, such as if the child is vomiting or has a high fever,” said Mott Poll co-director Sarah Clark, M.P.H. “But parents often have to guess at whether their child’s report of ‘not feeling well’ represents a good reason to miss school.”
The nationally representative report is based on 1,300 responses from parents of children ages 11 to 18 surveyed in February 2024.
Sick day decisions go beyond physical illness
More than half of parents say they’re more likely to keep kids home just to be safe in situations where it’s unclear how sick their child is. Another quarter of parents would send their child to school and hope for the best while less than a fifth would let their child decide.

As grades become more important to adolescents and teens in junior and senior high school, many parents also include academic considerations in their sick day decision. Nearly two thirds of parents say their child worries about an absence’s negative impact on grades or missing friends or school activities.
Clark recommends parents ask more questions to learn about their child’s request to stay home. If it’s on the day of a test, she says, it may reflect their lack of preparation or anxiety about performing well.
Mental health day considerations
Many parents recognize increasing mental health concerns among children, reflected by the 19% who say they’re open to allowing a child to take a mental health day.
Clark notes that in some instances, face to face interactions may trigger or exacerbate mental health issues, such as a breakup with a romantic partner, a falling out with friends, or an embarrassing incident shared on social media.
“It’s understandable that students may fear facing peers in uncomfortable social situations, but they can’t miss school every time they expect an unpleasant interaction,” she said.

“Facing discomfort is a natural part of life, and parents play an important role in helping kids to learn how to navigate these challenges in order to build resilience and develop healthy strategies for handling social stressors.”
In balancing their decisions about allowing their child a mental health day, parents may think about the purpose of the day away from school, she says. It may be an opportunity to help their child plan how to handle interactions, practice strategies to stay calm and ease anxiety, and identify specific peers, teachers or staff who could be sources of support.
For children who have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, missing school may be necessary to sustain the child’s well-being, Clark adds. Parents should consult with their child’s mental health provider for guidance.
Complying with school attendance policies
Nearly all parents polled say their school has an attendance policy, which they felt was necessary to ensure children go to school consistently. The majority of parents also think the amount and timeframe for making up missed schoolwork is reasonable.
However, many also acknowledge that compliance with school attendance policies can be particularly challenging for children with chronic medical conditions who often miss school due to medical visits or to avoid exacerbations of their condition.
“Parents agreed that attendance policies are important to preventing truancy or excessive absenteeism linked to poor school performance,” Clark said.
“However, parents of children with health issues that require traveling to regular appointments and even hospitalizations may need to have conversations with school administrators and teachers about the likelihood of health related absences. These families may need to enlist the child’s healthcare providers for support in requesting school flexibility in completing assignments at home or with additional time.”

Published11 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, ITVBy Emma SaundersEntertainment reporterKate Garraway has said the cost of care for her late husband Derek Draper has left her with huge debts.She was speaking in her latest documentary, Kate Garraway: Derek’s Story. Draper died aged 56 from the long-term effects of Covid, in January.While acknowledging her job as a presenter on GMB was well-paid, Garraway said the £16,000-a-month care costs were more than her ITV salary.Draper is heard speaking on camera during the programme. It is the first time he has been heard during the documentary series. He says: “I want you to hear my story… I want to be heard.”The documentary focuses on the last year of his life, as Garraway highlights the problems in the care system. Speaking before her husband’s death, she said: “Derek’s care costs more than my salary from ITV and that is before you pay for a mortgage, before you pay any household bills, before you pay for anything for the kids, so we are at a crunch point.”I am in debt. I can’t earn enough money to cover my debt because I am managing Derek’s care and I can’t even use the money I do have to support Derek’s recovery, because it’s going on the basics all the time.”Image source, ITVShe added: “I’m not going to pretend that I am poorly paid, I have an incredible job that I love, which is well-paid, but it’s not enough.”The presenter has previously documented the impact of caring for her husband in two other ITV programmes – Finding Derek and Caring For Derek.In the latest show, which airs on Tuesday evening on ITV, she says: “Time and time again the system tell us that Derek isn’t sick enough, doesn’t have enough of a health need to qualify for funded care.”I’ve appealed but that still hasn’t been processed two-and-a-half, three years later. If this is what it’s like for me, what on earth is it like for everybody else?”‘Falling off a cliff’She adds: “Something has to be done, or the whole service, the people working in it, everything, is going to break. Derek’s care, the basic needs, not including any therapy, which I am happy to pay on top, is nearly £4,000 a week. How can I afford that? How can anybody afford £16,000 a month?”We are entirely reliant on extraordinary carers, but the system in which they work in unbelievably complicated, and underfunded, and trying to meet an impossible need.”Why is it that people who get sick and it’s no longer considered the right thing for them to be in hospital… why does coming home feel like falling off a cliff?”Analysis by Alison Holt, BBC Social Affairs editorKate Garraway is far from alone in struggling with what can grow into the terrifyingly large costs of providing care week in, week out. With an ageing population and more people living with complex conditions, reform of the way adult social care is funded has been promised for a long time. Yet, government after government has failed to grasp the nettle. Families, usually at a time of crisis, are confronted with a complicated and unhelpful system. Only those with high needs and assets of less than £23,250 are eligible for council-funded care – a financial threshold that hasn’t changed for well over a decade. People who are severely disabled or have extremely high health needs may get NHS funded care, but many have told the BBC getting that help is an increasing battle. It is a system that leaves many family carers feeling abandoned financially and emotionally. More on this storyGarraway to return to TV role after husband’s funeralPublished4 FebruaryGarraway pays tribute to ‘darling husband’ DraperPublished5 JanuaryGarraway on husband’s battle with ‘evil virus’Published5 June 2020

RCSI research has found that venetoclax, a medication currently approved for leukaemia, has benefits for patients with multiple myeloma when used in combination with another drug. This discovery offers a new avenue of treatment options for the currently incurable disease.
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a type of blood cancer that is newly diagnosed in around 400 people in Ireland each year. Despite treatment advances in recent years, it remains incurable. The search for innovative treatment strategies is crucial, particularly for patients whose cancer is resistant to standard care.
In the new study published in Haematologica, researchers at the RCSI Department of Physiology and Medical Physics and the Beaumont RCSI Cancer Centre set out to identify complementary drugs that would enhance the efficiency of venetoclax, a drug approved for use in leukaemia, for MM treatment. Although previously tested in MM, venetoclax, which blocks the function of a protein called BCL-2, was only found to be effective for a small proportion of patients.
The researchers discovered that combining venetoclax with a drug called 5-azacytidine significantly increased its effectiveness across many MM cell lines, indicating a broader potential patient population that could be treated with the new combination.
“This research is a significant step in identifying more effective treatment options for multiple myeloma. By combining venetoclax and 5-azacytidine we’ve seen enhanced efficacy across a wide range of patient samples. It shows the benefits of re-evaluating existing treatments in new contexts to expand their potential.” said Professor Tríona Ní Chonghaile, Associate Professor and research lead, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics.
Professor Siobhán Glavey, Chair, RCSI Department of Pathology and Clinician Scientist, Beaumont RCSI Cancer Centre commented: “Discovering the potential of this new drug combination is a promising development. Our next goal is to test for efficacy and safety for multiple myeloma in a clinical trial setting to bring us closer to offering a new treatment strategy for patients.”
The mechanism of how the two drugs work efficiently together was also investigated and it was shown that the combination of the two therapies was effective in patient samples from different stages of cancer, even if that patient had been previously treated with chemotherapy drugs.
The research was conducted in collaboration with the Department of Haematology, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin; Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston; and the Department of Medicine/Haematology, University of Galway, Galway.
This study was supported by funding from Leukemia Research Foundation, Breakthrough Cancer Research and AbbVie.

Food insecurity among college students is associated with negative physical and mental health and lower academic performance and graduation rates. A recent research study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, investigates why over half of college students eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the nation’s largest food assistance program — do not apply.
Lead study author Suzanna M. Martinez, PhD, MS, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, explained, “In California, SNAP is known as CalFresh and despite policies and communication to improve college students’ access to CalFresh, participation remains low, with approximately 78% of those eligible not receiving benefits.”
While CalFresh benefits are paid by the federal government, county agencies are responsible for implementing policies, determining eligibility, processing applications, and distributing funds. This study conducted focus groups and interviews with county staff to determine how agency workers interpret the complex criteria for students to meet SNAP eligibility. Questions focused on how students’ applications differed from community applicants, steps taken when processing student applications, student-specific training, and suggested improvements to the process.
Five central themes were identified in interviews: (1) a need for more consistency in policy dissemination and program administration, (2) student exemptions and the application process are perceived as challenges for students, (3) facilitators of successfully processing student SNAP applications, (4) tracking policy changes is burdensome, and (5) eliminate the student rules.
Study findings illustrate that SNAP rules are challenging for students as well as those involved in the implementation of the rules. Also, eligibility requirements written over 50 years ago, based on the assumption that college students are primarily from middle-class families, are outdated. The research supports simplifying the student SNAP process to increase participation for eligible students, especially for historically minoritized racial and ethnic groups and low-income students for whom equitable access to SNAP benefits is critical.
Dr. Martinez added, “The timing of this study resulted in a natural experiment since COVID-19-related SNAP modifications streamlined the student application process and reduced administrative burden. These modifications alleviated some challenges discussed by county workers, confirming existing opinions to eliminate the student rules.”