USC researchers have received two National Institutes of Health grants totaling $7.5 million to investigate whether exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called “forever chemicals,” may increase the risk of liver and endometrial cancers. The studies will examine pre-diagnostic blood samples and laboratory models to identify how PFAS may contribute to cancer development and to explore how factors such as neighborhood, income and food access may influence exposure and risk.

The immune system possesses legions of T cells that, if they were primed, could hunt down and destroy tumors. Now, a UC San Francisco team has invented a way to do this by combining immune cells that are grown in the lab with samples from a patient’s tumor. 

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) neurosurgeon Hai Sun, MD, PhD, has been awarded a five-year, $2.9 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support a groundbreaking study aimed at improving the accuracy of pre-surgical mapping and planning for patients who seek surgery as a treatment option for epilepsy. RWJUH is a RWJBarnabas Health facility.

Patients with sickle cell disease are often hesitant to undergo transformative gene therapy — the current lengthy process requires multiple hospital visits to collect enough stem cells. Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital have helped smooth the road to gene therapy with a new approach that collects enough of the patient’s stem cells in a single hospital admission for most patients, improving the turnaround time for genetically altering and infusing the cells back into the patient. The long-term follow-up results of the first-in-human pilot phase I clinical trial are published recently in Blood.