Tag: Department of Pediatrics

  • Health

    Gene chips aid drug search in rare cancers

    When Kimberly Stegmaier was a pediatric oncology fellow at Dana-Farber and Children’s Hospital Boston six years ago, she says,”I was struck by how poorly our young patients with AML (acute myeloid leukemia) do.” Long-term survival is about 50 percent, compared with 80 percent from those with the more prevalent ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia). Clearly, better…

    2–3 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Researchers uncover cause of asthma

    Medical experts have been baffled by what causes asthma. Most of them favor the idea that it stems from “helper” cells that have gone awry. But researchers at Harvard Medical School have come up with convincing evidence that the answer lies in a special type of natural “killer” cell. We were very, very surprised,” admits…

    2–3 minutes
  • Health

    Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults

    The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from 1972-1979. Enrollment was open to families in Brookline, Mass., and to some urban families in neighboring Boston. The program provided health, educational, and social services…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Protein seen to animate cell skeleton

    The cytoskeleton is made up of arrays of actin filaments that are arranged into widely different structures — parallel arrays that mediate muscle contraction, networks of branched filaments at the leading edge of migratory cells, and parallel bundles required to pinch cells apart at the end of cell division. The critical juncture of filament growth…

    1–2 minutes
  • Health

    Six new breast cancer-susceptibility genes found

    The discovery of six new cancer-susceptibility genes grew out of more than 10 years of research by Alan D’Andrea into Fanconi anemia, a condition known to affect only 500 families in the United States. Children born with the condition usually develop bone marrow failure early in life, leaving them unable to produce oxygen-carrying red blood…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Scientists using gene chips identify unique form of leukemia

    Currently, physicians diagnose and treat a rare form of cancer that strikes infants as a particularly aggressive form of the more common acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The cancer may respond to chemotherapy at first, but it tends to recur fatally. That’s why the prognosis is so much worse than for most types of childhood leukemia, which…

    1–2 minutes