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Awards To Highlight Military Health Heroes, Wales
The Welsh Assembly Government is today encouraging people to nominate health professionals for a major UK-wide award aimed at highlighting their contribution to the care of armed services personnel.
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Royal Colleges Call On Health Managers To Take Responsibility For Safeguarding Children, UK
The Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health commented on a new report from the Care Quality Commission, Safeguarding children: a review of arrangements in the NHS for safeguarding children. The report found that some providers had excellent systems and staff were delivering good practice, however in others training and evaluating procedures were patchy and many health organisations need to improve as a matter of urgency.
News of the day
Physicians Spend The Equivalent Of Nearly Three Work Weeks On Health Plan Interactions
As policymakers consider ways to cut health costs as a part of health reform, a new national survey of physician practices finds that physicians on average are spending the equivalent of three work weeks annually on administrative tasks required by health plans. According to the study by Lawrence P. Casalino, M.D., Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College and colleagues, physician practices report that overall the costs of interacting with insurance plans is $31 billion annually and 6.9 percent of all U.S. expenditures for physician and clinical services. The study, published in the online issue of Health Affairs, was co-funded by The Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation"s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) Initiative.
Nutrition

Scientists Find Faster, Cheaper Way To Identify Cancer Causing Genes

Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System have found a new way to study how genes function in living organisms, and their approach could substantially cut the time and costs that drug makers spend in searching for potential targets for new cancer therapies. "A big problem in biology is that there are many thousands of genes. Testing the function of any one of them in a living organism, such as a mouse, has traditionally been slow and very expensive," notes Ian Macara, PhD, professor of microbiology at UVA"s School of Medicine and co-author of a study published in the June 15 issue of Genes & Development. "The new technology is hundreds of times cheaper and many times faster than traditional approaches. While we used it to study the function of a specific breast-developing gene, our method can be replicated in screening for genes that can suppress tumors or cause cancer." In Genes & Development, UVA researchers describe how they isolated mammary gland stem cells from mice and then infected the cells with a virus that enabled the scientists to manipulate a particular gene and cause it to glow green. When transplanted in mice that had undergone mastectomies, the altered stem cells regenerated entire new breasts within a few months. Because the target gene glowed green, researchers could monitor its role in the development of the new breast. The UVA study tracked Par3, a polarity protein that controls how cells acquire particular shapes, so that they have a top and a bottom. "When we shut off this gene, the stem cells had problems differentiating into the right types of cells, causing problems with mammary development. Interestingly, the glands that formed looked very much like early, pre-malignant tumor growths," explains Luke Martin McCaffrey, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Cell Signaling at UVA and study co-author. Par3"s function is of interest to cancer researchers and drug developers because the protein helps regulate the shape of epithelial cells, which can become malignant when deformed. Over 90 percent of solid tumors arise from epithelial cells, and early dissemination of transformed cells to distant sites is the leading cause of death from cancer. University of Virginia Health System


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