Also, check out the #TedMed tweets or Nature’s tweets for news about Ozzy Osbourne’s genetic profile, which was analyzed Knome, the Cambridge Mass. genome sequencing company.

From Mass General Tighter ethics rules have reduced industrial relationship of NIH scientists

The 2005 ethics rules that govern relationships between researchers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other industrial companies have significantly reduced the prevalence of such collaborations without affecting standard measures of research productivity, according to a study in the November issue of Academic Medicine. However, this report from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) also finds that NIH scientists and administrators believe the new rules are too restrictive.

From MIT…(I)n a study of mice with lymphoma, MIT biologists have discovered that a small number of cancer cells escape chemotherapy by hiding out in the thymus, an organ where immune cells mature. Within the thymus, the cancer cells are bathed in growth factors that protect them from the drugs’ effects. Those cells are likely the source of relapsed tumors, said Michael Hemann, MIT assistant professor of biology, who led the study.

From the BIDMC:Hospital visits following outpatient gastrointestinal endoscopies may be more common than previously estimated, according to a report in the October 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

About 15 to 20 million endoscopic procedures, in which a clinician uses a tube-like instrument called an endoscope to see inside a patient’s body, are performed each year in the United States, according to background information in the article. However, data on the safety of these procedures and the complications occurring afterward are limited. Most estimates have relied on physician reporting, review of medical records and follow-up interviews, which may not capture all adverse events related to endoscopy.