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The work to improve health and health care is ongoing and ever-evolving. It takes many shapes, from streamlining delivery to improving care and pursuing inclusive medical research to help develop precision medicine for all populations.This was a key element of the Arizona Return of Actionable Variants Empirical, or RAVE, study, which [...]

Training the workforce of the future is a strategic priority of Mayo Clinic's Center for Regenerative Medicine. Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from outside the classroom. This year, regenerative sciences students readily adapted to a stealthy foe that exploded on the scene, seemingly from nowhere. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered [...]

Lots of chatter last week on COVID-19 and the pending arrival of a vaccine(s). Our researchers and clinicians agree that vaccines are a useful part of our toolbox for fighting infectious disease, and have high hopes for effective reduction of the risks of COVID-19 through widespread vaccination. Other research that [...]

Joanne Garnett has harrowing memories of that life-changing day back in 1981. She was a 39-year-old land use planner living in Wyoming when she received a call from her doctor confirming she had uterine cancer.  “I was shocked, and it was strange because I didn’t fit any profile for uterine cancer,” Garnett [...]

November is National Diabetes Month, a time to reflect on new ways to manage a chronic condition that affects young and old. Mayo Clinic is applying a regenerative lens to advancing diabetes care beyond routine blood checks and standard insulin therapy. Quinn Peterson, Ph.D.; Aleksey Matveyenko, Ph.D.; and Alexander Revzin, Ph.D., [...]

Many of you may feel like it's been a really long time since the last update, but in reality, it's been 7 days. Thanksgiving in 2020 and the fretting related to the holiday – amplified 100-fold by COVID-19 – may have made this past week seem unusually long. But at [...]

A 3D model of brain organoids — "a minibrain in a dish" — mimics human brain structure and provides a new scientific strategy for exploring the pathology of Alzheimer's disease, Mayo Clinic research discovered. The study, which was published in Nature Communications, finds that the minibrain — an induced pluripotent [...]

There were all sorts of different things in the news this week, but perhaps the most heartening was the news from Dr. Anthony Fauci and our own Gregory Poland, M.D., that Santa Claus and the elves are practicing safe behaviors and COVID-19 won't stop Christmas from arriving.  Read on for [...]

When a person is diagnosed with breast cancer, surgery can be their first treatment. Other times, their clinician will prescribe chemotherapy before surgery, called neoadjuvant chemotherapy. In both cases, for patients with clinically negative nodes at presentation, surgeons will determine at the time of surgery how far the cancer has [...]

Genetic testing can uncover inherited genetic mutations, and could individualize cancer therapies, improve survival, manage cancer in loved ones and push the boundaries of precision medicine. In a new study published in JAMA Oncology, scientists with Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine conducted genetic testing in more than 3,000 patients who were diagnosed with cancer [...]

Early research at Mayo Clinic is a step toward hope for a future treatment for patients with traumatic spinal cord injury. The research in this article discusses the experience related to the first case in a phase I safety study of mesenchymal stem cell treatment for spinal cord injury. The case [...]

Our research and researchers showed up in a wide range of news stories over the last week, including potential benefits of coffee for patients with colorectal cancer, plus other related stories on racial disparities in screening, and recurrence of polyps. There is COVID-19 news you can use related to obesity, [...]

By Jay Furst The donation of a kidney to a person in need of a transplant is one of the most profound gifts a person can offer. The process for living kidney donors is safe, and, at Mayo Clinic, which has one of the largest living-donor kidney transplant programs in the [...]

What is your background? I am a biochemist by training and performed all of my graduate studies in Portugal, at the School of Medicine of the University of Minho, located in a northern Portuguese city called Braga. It was in grad school that I started to develop a particular taste for [...]

As SARS-CoV-2 spreads throughout the world, COVID-19 has become the subject of almost every conversation. Not surprisingly, the media are actively following developments in research on symptoms, testing, treatment and vaccines. In addition to some of these stories, you'll find Mayo Clinic research and researchers highlighted across a wide range [...]

The largest regenerative medicine clinical trial to date for heart failure finds stem cell therapy is safe over the long term and benefits patients with advanced left ventricular enlargement. This multinational research, co-led by Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic's Center for Regenerative Medicine, and published in ESC [...]

This summer, COVID-19 nearly sidetracked research training plans for more than 200 students who had been accepted in to Mayo’s competitive undergraduate programs—Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) and Undergraduate Research Experience Program (UREP).  However, instead of cancelling the programs, the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences decided to innovate [...]

By Christoph Bahn Flu season is just now unfolding. But this time, it’s piggy-backed with a pandemic, which threatens to spike with the colder weather as people huddle indoors. Adding to this conundrum is the unsettling fact that, for both COVID-19 and the flu, the symptoms overlap. “It’s almost impossible to distinguish [...]

If you spend any time reading or listening to health care news, you know that some of the same stories are still making their way around the world as last week or even from several weeks back. You may see some repeats from a different news outlet here, but we [...]

By Lisa Newkirk Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, but patients who are diagnosed at an early stage can survive five years or longer. A team at Mayo Clinic is developing patient-centered solutions for early detection of pancreatic cancer using artificial intelligence and biomarkers. This year, over 57,000 Americans [...]

Mesenchymal stem cells derived from a person's fat cells may help repair kidney damage caused by narrowing blood vessels, Mayo Clinic research has discovered. The research by Stephen Textor, M.D., and his team is published in Kidney International. Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine and the National Institutes of Health supported [...]

Sometimes satisfaction must be found in the day-to-day steps while continuing the work of finding a breakthrough. For Eva Morava-Kozicz, M.D., Ph.D., the process of developing therapies for new metabolic disorders is a fight won by inches, against an opponent that does not fight fair. Dr. Morava-Kozicz’s latest work concerns genetic conditions [...]

At Mayo Clinic, patient care is evidence-based, meaning research drives the practice of medicine. Our scientists and clinician researchers are at work across the spectrum of health and the delivery of health care, seeking better outcomes and enhanced experiences while managing the total costs of care. Curable dementia, pot and [...]

By Nick Fetty, Iowa State University College of Engineering Surgeons and other medical professionals can develop musculoskeletal problems because of the excessive amount of time they spend on their feet and the awkward postures that they assume during their work tasks. Researchers in Iowa State University’s Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems [...]

By Jay Furst The COVID-19 pandemic has added a new and hard-to-answer concern for pregnant women: Does COVID-19 pose greater risks for the mother during pregnancy? Kavita Narang, M.D., a fellow in the Mayo Clinic Division of Maternal and Fetal Medicine, recently co-authored a review in Mayo Clinic Proceedings on COVID-19 and [...]