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Decoding the complete DNA of cancer patients is giving scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis a clearer picture of the complexity of the disease and allowing them to see intriguing and unexpected genetic relationships among patients.

CHAPEL HILL – As leaders of the former Khmer Rouge regime testify in a human rights tribunal, in harrowing detail, for the killing of more than a million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 a central medical question remains unanswered: will the trials help a society heal or exacerbate the lingering affects of widespread trauma?

A new study by Mayo Clinic researchers has found that relief of pain from vertebral compression fractures, as well as improvement in pain-related dysfunction, were similar in patients treated with vertebroplasty and those treated with simulated vertebroplasty without cement injections. The article, "A Randomized Controlled Trial of Vertebroplasty for Osteoporotic Spine Fractures," is in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Both combination and sequential single-agent chemotherapy are reasonable options to treat metastatic breast cancer, but the choice between the two should ultimately be based on patient and disease-related factors, according to a new commentary published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

A study, led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, examined cancer cells from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and from a new strain of mice that develop a very similar disease.

Gary Chiang, Ph.D., and colleagues at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have elucidated how the stability of the REDD1 protein is regulated. The REDD1 protein is a critical inhibitor of the mTOR signaling pathway, which controls cell growth and proliferation. The study was published in EMBO Reports .

Predicting the infection patterns of influenza, requires tracking the ecology and the evolution of the fast-morphing viruses which cause them, said a Duke University researcher who enlists computers to model such changes.

A single mutation can put a flu virus on a new-enough path to re-infect people who had developed immunity to its previous form, said Katia Koelle, a Duke assistant professor of biology.

CHAPEL HILL – The structure of an entire HIV genome has been decoded for the first time by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The results have widespread implications for understanding the strategies that viruses, like the one that causes AIDS, use to infect humans.

The study, the cover story in the Aug. 6, 2009, issue of the journal Nature, also opens the door for further research which could accelerate the development of antiviral drugs.

A new class of drugs made up of single strands of DNA or RNA, called aptamers, can bind protein targets with a high strength and specificity. They are currently in clinical development as treatments for a broad range of common diseases, as described in an article published in Oligonucleotides. The article is available at www.liebertpub.com/oli

Vectors derived from retroviruses are useful tools for long-term gene transfer because they allow stable integration of transgenes and propagation into daughter cells. Lentiviral vectors are preferred because they can transduce non-proliferating cellular targets. These vectors can be engineered to target specific tissues. In the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, François-Loïc Cosset and colleagues from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon present a method for targeting hematopoietic stem cells using engineered viral vectors.

A research team led by Dr. Tony Lam at the Toronto General Research Institute and the University of Toronto discovered a novel function of a hormone found in the gut that might potentially lower glucose levels in diabetes.

A new study suggests that blood transfusions for hospitalized cardiac patients should be a last resort because they double the risk of infection and increase by four times the risk of death.

The analysis of nearly 25,000 Medicare patients in Michigan also showed that transfusion practices after heart surgery varied substantially among hospitals, a red flag that plays into the health care reform debate.

A new study raises the possibility that flies and other insects that encounter nanomaterial "hot spots," or spills, near manufacturing facilities in the future could pick up and transport nanoparticles on their bodies, transferring the particles to other flies or habitats in the environment. The study on carbon nanoparticles — barely 1/5,000th the width of a human hair —is scheduled for the Aug. 15 issue of ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

In an advance that could help ease the antibiotic drought, scientists in Massachusetts are describing successful use of a test that enlists pinhead-sized worms in efforts to discover badly needed new antibiotics. Their study appeared in ACS Chemical Biology, a monthly journal.

In a finding that challenges the increasingly popular belief that smoking marijuana is less harmful to health than smoking tobacco, researchers in Canada are reporting that smoking marijuana, like smoking tobacco, has toxic effects on cells. Their study is scheduled for the Aug. 17 issue of ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology, a monthly journal.