Body

Increasingly common insurance plans that encourage patients to receive care from physicians who keep medical costs lower are based on unreliable estimates of doctor performance and may not achieve the intended savings, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The first major assessment of physician cost profiling found that about one-fourth of the 13,788 physicians studied would be misclassified under the system of cost ranking commonly used by insurance plans, according to findings published in the March 18 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report that in a small study of women with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer, gemcitabine and cisplatin, when used in combination, produced a response rate in fifty percent of patients.

Jubilee Brown, M.D., associate professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Gynecologic Oncology, presented the findings at today's plenary session of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists' 41st Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer.

SALT LAKE CITY—Treating virulent influenza, sepsis, and other potentially deadly infections long has focused on looking for ways to kill viruses and bacteria. But new research from the University of Utah and Utah State University shows that modulating the body's own overeager inflammatory response to infection may help save more lives.

A team of McGill Chemistry Department researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of nanotubes – tiny "magic bullets" that could one day deliver drugs to specific diseased cells. Sleiman explains that the research involves taking DNA out of its biological context. So rather than being used as the genetic code for life, it becomes a kind of building block for tiny nanometre-scale objects.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Fungi have significant potential for "horizontal" gene transfer, a new study has shown, similar to the mechanisms that allow bacteria to evolve so quickly, become resistant to antibiotics and cause other serious problems.

This discovery, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, suggests that fungi have the capacity to rapidly change the make-up of their genomes and become infectious to plants and possibly animals, including humans.

HOUSTON - Increased understanding of the Skp2 gene and its relation to cellular senescence may lead to the development of novel agents that can suppress tumor development in common types of cancer, researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center report in the journal Nature.

Philadelphia – Highly-focused stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) can eliminate the targeted tumor while avoiding treatment-related illness and may ultimately improve survival for patients with inoperable non-small cell lung cancer, according to early findings of a Radiation Therapy Oncology Group study published in the March 17 cancer-themed issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The reluctance of securities analysts to recommend investment in veteran companies using new techniques to grapple with radical technological change may be harming these companies as they struggle to compete, according to a new study in the current issue of Organization Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---In findings that took the experimenters three years to believe, University of Michigan engineers and their collaborators have demonstrated that light itself can twist ribbons of nanoparticles.

The results are published in the current edition of Science.

Montreal, March 17, 2010 – Every day, our gut comes in contact with bacteria, inducing an inflammatory response that is tolerated and controlled. Sometimes the control of inflammation is lost and this can lead to inflammatory bowel disease that may predispose to colon cancer. Caspase-1, an important protein involved in the mechanism of inflammation, has long been believed to be one of the culprits behind excessive inflammation in the colon. Dr. Saleh's team suggests the opposite in a new study.

New Orleans, LA – Research led by Wayne L. Backes, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology and Associate Dean for Research at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Medicine, has found that drug metabolism depends not only upon which enzymes are present in an individual, but also how they interact, and that can be the difference in whether a drug is safely eliminated from the body or is converted into a toxic or carcinogenic byproduct. The paper will be published in the March 19, 2010 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The Quantitative Analysis of Normal Tissue Effects in the Clinic (QUANTEC) review has been published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, the official journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) to update recommendations for the safe irradiation of 16 organs. For each organ, the relationship between dose/volume and clinical outcome is reviewed. These reviews replace initial recommendations published in 1991.

Given the complexity of cancer treatment, skin care may seem like a small matter. However, a nurse at the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center knew that skin issues were a constant source of anxiety for many patients receiving radiation therapy, and through research she discovered that routine advice was rooted in myth instead of scientific evidence.

Her findings, which have been published in the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, are prompting change locally and across the country.

Despite the hyperbole, there are many examples that prove that business use of the Internet is not always profitable, the bursting of the dot.com bubble aside. Now, a Tunisian researcher reports in the International Journal of Technology Marketing that while unique use of the technology is not enough to generate competitive value, there are approaches that allow companies to improve their performance and so their bottom line.

Jerusalem, March 17, 2010 – An improved method for sustainable pest control using "super-sexed" but sterile male insects to copulate with female ones is being developed by agricultural researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The scientists thus hope to offer yet another efficient and promising avenue for supplying produce to the market by eliminating pests without damage to the environment.