cancer screening equity | Mercy is working to break down barriers to cancer screenings through early detection blood tests. While the tests are not covered by insurance yet, the health care system offers a percentage of free tests to those considered high-risk who are unable to pay. It also will join GRAIL’s Real-world Evidence to Advance Multi-Cancer Early Detection Health Equity (REACH) study, an initiative which enrolls patients from underserved communities free of charge. “This is the first version of multi-cancer early detection testing,” says Dr. Gautum Agarwal, urologic oncologist and director of Mercy’s Office of Precision Medicine. “As additional trials are completed and the test becomes more efficient in terms of the cost to run the samples, we expect the cost to decrease over time.”
alzheimer’s advances
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have developed a way to model the effects of aging in late-onset Alzheimer’s disease without a brain biopsy. The team devised a method to study aged neurons by transforming skin cells from patients with Alzheimer’s into brain cells. The lab-derived neurons accurately reproduce the hallmarks of the dementia, including amyloid beta buildup, tau protein deposits and neuronal cell death. “Sporadic, late-onset Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of Alzheimer’s disease, representing more than 95% of cases,” says Andrew Yoo, Ph.D., a professor of developmental biology. “It has been very difficult to study in the lab due to the complexity of the disease stemming from various risk factors, including aging as an important contributor. Until now, we did not have a way to capture the effects of aging in the cells to study late-onset Alzheimer’s.”
researching kidney disease
Saint Louis University is enrolling living kidney donors as part of a study to assess the use of genetic testing to mitigate racial disparities in the health outcomes of people with chronic kidney disease. Professor of medicine Dr. Krista Lentine is part of a network working to shed light on the topic, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded her team an additional five years of funding for APOLLO, one of the most extensive and longest-running national studies conducted in the field of transplantation. “African ancestry is associated with an increased risk of kidney failure in the general population overall and following living donation,” Lentine says. “Moreover, kidney transplants from deceased donors with African ancestry have an increased risk of graft failure compared to organs from non-African ancestral donors.”