Academic Research

ABO blood-type compatibility between organ donors and recipients is crucial for safe transplantations. Across the different ABO blood groups, longer wait-times for a kidney transplant are often experienced by patients who have type B blood because it is a less common ABO blood type, resulting in fewer donors.

A specific colonization of microbes in the reproductive tract is commonly found in women with ovarian cancer, according to a new study from Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine. The discovery, published in Scientific Reports, strengthens evidence that the bacterial component of the microbiome — a community of microorganisms that also consists of viruses, yeasts and fungi — is an important indicator for early detection, diagnosis and prognosis of ovarian cancer.

Tau protein is notorious for forming tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and several other neurodegenerative disorders, and for helping to cause cognitive decline associated with those diseases. University of Virginia neuroscientists have revealed how a toxic form of tau spreads through the brain as the disease progresses, what provokes its accumulation and how it harms nerve cells called neurons. Scientists may be able to leverage these findings to develop new Alzheimer’s treatments that prevent or delay symptom onset, or slow disease progression once symptoms develop.

Psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and depression, affect nearly one in five adults in the United States and nearly half of patients diagnosed with a psychiatric illness also meet the criteria for a second. With so much overlap, researchers have begun to suspect that there may be one neurobiological explanation for a variety of psychiatric illnesses. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigated four pre-existing, publicly available neurological and psychiatric datasets, and pinpointed a network of brain areas underlying psychiatric illnesses.