CHICAGO (Reuters) – A daily dose of powerful anti-HIV medicine helped cut the risk of infection with the AIDS virus by 49 percent in intravenous drug users in a Bangkok study that showed for the first time such a preventive step can work in this high-risk population.

“This is a significant step forward for HIV prevention,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped conduct the clinical trial along with the Thailand Ministry of Health.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A U.S. group that sets policy for organ transplants voted on Monday to give some children access to adult organs after the parents of two children successfully sued to add them to the adult list for lung transplants.

The cases, both in Pennsylvania, have touched off a debate in the United States over how donor organs – a scarce, life-saving resource – should be allocated among the 1,659 people, including 30 children, on the waiting list for a lung transplant.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Researchers have been working for years to determine whether genetic glitches are driving high rates of especially deadly breast cancer in black women in the United States.

Now, the most comprehensive genetic study yet found that one in five black women already diagnosed with breast cancer and referred for genetic counseling had at least one of 18 genetic mutations known to increase the risk of the disease.

CHICAGO, June 2 (Reuters) – A Merck & Co drug
designed to unmask tumor cells and mobilize the immune system
into fighting cancer helped shrink tumors in 38 percent of
patients with advanced melanoma in an early-stage study, U.S.
researchers said on Sunday.

The findings on the melanoma drug lambrolizumab were
published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented
at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago
this weekend.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A simple screening program for cervical cancer using vinegar and visual exams helped reduce deaths caused by the cancer by 31 percent in a group of 150,000 poor women in India, researchers reported on Sunday.

If implemented broadly, the screening program could lead to the prevention of 22,000 deaths from cervical cancer in India, and 72,000 deaths in the developing world each year, the team reported at the American College of Cardiology Meeting in Chicago.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – In his first few weeks as head of the melanoma group at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center seven years ago, a young man walked into Dr. Gary Schwartz’s office with a rare form of the skin cancer that affects the eye.

“It was horrible. He died of metastatic disease. He was only 24. I promised him I would find a way to cure his cancer,” recalls the physician-scientist of the patient who helped inspire his quest to find an effective treatment for uveal melanoma, which affects 2,000 to 3,000 patients each year.

CHICAGO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer over a year ago, Gabe Tartaglia was loath to undergo the kind of harsh chemotherapy that had devastated his sister before her death three years earlier from pancreatic cancer.

He decided to enter a clinical trial for a new drug designed to trigger the immune system to fight cancer. The results were better than anyone expected.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. scientists say a dramatic result last year suggesting that a cancer drug already approved by U.S. regulators could quickly clear out Alzheimer’s plaques in mice was too good to be true.

The study, published last year in the journal Science, showed the skin cancer drug bexarotene cut the amount of an Alzheimer’s-linked protein called beta amyloid by half in three days. It also reversed Alzheimer’s symptoms, restoring a sense of smell in treated mice and allowing them to resume nest building activities.

CHICAGO, May 23 (Reuters) – Kathrin Jansen is a
microbiologist with at least two breakthrough vaccines to her
name: she brought the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil to market
for Merck and helped develop the $4 billion a year pneumonia and
meningitis vaccine Prevnar 13 for Pfizer.

Jansen’s next vaccine success could come by taming the
superbug MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium that she has seen
ravage a healthy man up close and personally.

May 21 (Reuters) – Moore, Oklahoma, has had the bad luck of
being hit by two highly destructive tornadoes, both in the month
of May, 14 years apart.

But the Moore that got struck on Monday is not the same as
in 1999. Like a lot of towns across America and in the so-called
“Tornado Alley,” rapid growth has made it a bigger target,
vulnerable to more damage.