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Medicine & Health

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 22-Jun-2026 04:16 ET (22-Jun-2026 08:16 GMT/UTC)

Birding enthusiasts can help songbirds avoid salmonella epidemics

University of California - Los Angeles
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In years when pine cone production is very low, forest songbirds sometimes migrate in large numbers into cities, where they congregate around bird feeders. In these crowded conditions, salmonellosis, the illness caused by the Salmonella bacterium, can spread through their population and even sicken people, pets and poultry. UCLA researchers are developing a tool that can predict when these outbreaks are likely to happen so people can take down their feeders to prevent the epidemic from starting.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Can future-focused thoughts help smokers quit?

Virginia Tech
Grant and Award Announcement

Nearly 15 percent of U.S. adults continue to smoke, often because long-term health risks feel too abstract compared with the immediate rewards. Jeff Stein, an addiction researcher at Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, is leading a National Cancer Institute–funded study testing whether episodic future thinking — a strategy that helps people vividly imagine their personal future — can reduce impulsivity and support quitting. The fully remote study will enroll 128 participants nationwide and combine the intervention with counseling and nicotine patches.

Ochsner Health names Dr. Timothy Riddell executive vice president and chief operating officer

Ochsner Health System
Business Announcement

Ochsner Health has appointed Dr. Timothy Riddell as its new executive vice president and chief operating officer. In this role, Dr. Riddell will oversee clinical operations across the system’s 47 hospitals and more than 370 health and urgent care centers. He plays a vital part in guiding Ochsner toward its long-term goals for sustainability and success.

LLM treatment advice agrees with physician recommendations in early-stage HCC, but falls short in late stage

PLOS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Large language models (LLM) can generate treatment recommendations for straightforward cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) that align with clinical guidelines but fall short in more complex cases, according to a new study by Ji Won Han from The Catholic University of Korea and colleagues publishing January 13^th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

Journal: PLOS Medicine

Novel immunotherapy demonstrates early potential to overcome resistance to immune checkpoint therapy

University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Peer-Reviewed Publication

According to a Phase I study led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, published today in Nature Medicine, the novel monoclonal antibody linavonkibart demonstrated the potential to overcome treatment resistance to anti-PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitors in multiple cancer types.

Journal: Nature Medicine

CHEST releases guideline on biologic management in severe asthma

American College of Chest Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The American College of Chest Physicians released a new clinical guideline on biologic management in severe asthma containing seven evidence-based recommendations.

Journal: CHEST Journal

Therapies that target specific type of cell death may be an effective avenue for cancer treatment, UTHealth Houston researchers find

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Therapies that target the utilization of fat by tumors and activate a type of cell death dependent on fat molecules may be a promising avenue to treat cancer, according to new research by UTHealth Houston.

Journal: Trends in Cancer

Wyss Institute-led collaboration awarded by ARPA-H PRINT program to engineer off-the-shelf, universal, transplant-ready graft for liver failure

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard
Grant and Award Announcement

In a highly collaborative, cross-institutional ImPLANT project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue (PRINT) program under a new contract of up to $25M over 5 years, world-leading researchers from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, MIT, University of Colorado Boulder, and Columbia University join their expertise to create the multidisciplinary technological framework for building the first off-the-shelf engineered product that could address liver failure in many of the over 500M patients who suffer from the disease worldwide.

No thyme wasted: Harnessing the medicinal benefits of thyme extract With small doses

American Institute of Physics
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Thyme can provide anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and immune benefits, but the extract vaporizes quickly and too much can be irritating, so researchers have developed a method to encapsulate nanodroplets of thyme extract within another fluid. They create a solution of thyme extract and gelatin and then push this through a tiny chip simultaneously with a jet of sodium alginate. The chip focuses the two fluids into a single flow and then a jet of oil breaks the multicomponent fluid apart into tiny, encapsulated droplets.

Journal: Physics of Fluids