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Nursing homes with the largest proportions of non-White residents experience 3.3 times more COVID-19 deaths than do nursing homes with the largest proportions of White residents, according to a new study from the University of Chicago. The paper, published in
JAMA Network Open, suggests that these differences are likely due to nursing home size and the level of coronavirus spread in the local community, reinforcing the inseparability of long-term care facilities from society at large when it comes to bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to heel.
Since the start of the pandemic, between 35% and 40% of COVID-19 deaths have been associated with long-term care facilities. Senior author R. Tamara Konetzka, PhD, the Louis Block Professor of Public Health Sciences and the College at UChicago, wanted to bring her 25 years of experience studying nursing homes to ask why these facilities were experiencing such devastation from the coronavirus and if it was possible to predict which nurs
IDFC Institute, an economic development-focused think-tank in Mumbai. Malani conducts research in law and economics, development economics and health economics, and has been leading a series of Covid-19 serosurveys in cities and states across India with IDFC.
Based on seroprevalence data, IDFC has advised state governments on policy to control the spread of the disease, and now on vaccine allocations. He spoke to Rukmini S about innovations in collecting Covid-19 data in India, the limits of serosurveys, and how herd immunity thresholds for the disease can change.
Anup Malani, professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the university’s Pritzker School of Medicine. Photo credit: IDFC Institute via IndiaSpend
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The National Cancer Institute s Genomic Data Commons (GDC), launched in 2016 by then-Vice President Joseph Biden and hosted at the University of Chicago, has become one of the largest and most widely used resources in cancer genomics, with more than 3.3 petabytes of data from more than 65 projects and over 84,000 anonymized patient cases, serving more than 50,000 unique users each month.
In new papers published Feb. 22 in
Nature Genetics, the UChicago-based research team shares new details about the GDC, which is funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), via subcontract with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, currently operated by Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc. One of the papers describes the design and operation of the GDC. The other describes the pipelines used by the GDC for the harmonization of data submitted to the GDC and the generation of datasets used by the GDC research community.
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Targeted radiation is often used to study and treat diverse cancer types. A multidisciplinary research team based at the University of Chicago Medicine has recently focused on a type of cell that releases a protein that enhances resistance to cancer therapies and promotes tumor progression.
The study focused on Ter cells, which are extra medullary erythroid precursers that secrete the neuropeptide artemin. In the study, published February 24, 2020, in
Science Translational Medicine, the researchers showed that local tumor radiotherapy, systemic immunotherapy or the combination of both treatments were able to deplete Ter cells in the spleen, reduce artemin production and limit tumor progression both in the locally irradiated tumors as well as outside the radiation fields.