Medical Research

A secondary analysis of data from the Thai AIDS vaccine trial -- announced last month to much acclaim -- suggests that the vaccine might provide some protection against the virus, but that the results are not statistically significant. In short, they could have come about merely by chance. Initial results from the trial involving more than 16,000 people had shown that the vaccine reduced infections by about 31% and that the results, though limited, were statistically significant. But the new analysis, which was part of the trial protocol, showed that it seemed to reduce infections by 26%. Results from the secondary analysis have been circulating for a couple of weeks, but the full results of the trial did not become available until they were published online in the New England Journal of Medicine and announced today at a conference in Paris.

Researchers for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., touting the safety of the company's new smokeless cigarette, were put in the unusual position Friday of avowing that regular cigarettes are linked to cancer in mice. The researchers presented data on Eclipse, RJR's new smokeless cigarette, at a conference at Duke University. Reynolds helped pay the conference costs.

Amgen Inc., the Thousand Oaks-based biotechnology giant, said Monday that it has begun the first human tests of its experimental drug GDNF that is designed to treat Parkinson's disease. The drug will be tested at various Parkinson's disease treatment centers in North America, and the test will last 12 to 15 months. Experimental drugs typically go through three test phases on people before they can be approved for sale, and the first phase primarily tests whether the drug is safe.

A multinational team of researchers has found that bone marrow transplants are an effective cure for sickle cell anemia but only for a small group of people who can get the right marrow match from a sibling. A study of 22 carefully selected children with a severe form of the disease found that 16 were apparently cured by the transplant.

Harvard researchers report in the Aug. 8 Nature that they have identified and cloned a gene called age-1 that plays a major role in aging in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. They found that the gene is the blueprint for an enzyme called PI(3)K that is involved in cellular communication and the transmission of signals across cellular membranes.

A highly toxic cancer drug linked to antibodies and directed against a protein on the surface of cancer cells can completely eradicate human colon tumors grown in mice without producing adverse side effects, researchers from ImmunoGen Inc. reported in the Aug. 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Colorectal cancer is one of the most common malignancies, striking about 140,000 Americans each year, killing 55,000. Surgery is the most common treatment.

St. John's wort, a plant used in European folk medicines to relieve depression, might actually ease some of the symptoms in some people, researchers report today. A review of 23 different studies, most of them published in non-English medical journals, suggested that St. John's wort, known scientifically as Hypericum perforatum, worked 2.7 times better than a placebo and roughly as well as numerous antidepressant drugs in mildly depressed people.

Morris Maizels was not a likely candidate for medical celebrity. He was not a specialist working on a high-tech frontier and he was not associated with a renowned research institution. Maizels, 44, was a family practitioner who had a career very much out of the spotlight, seeing patients with a variety of run-of-the-mill ailments at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Woodland Hills.

She remembers the doctor opening his office door and not looking at her. "You don't even have to say it," she told him. "It's bad, isn't it?" "Yeah, it's pretty bad." They agreed that he would perform exploratory surgery on her left breast, where the tumor was, and that he would decide whether to remove just the lump or take more tissue. When she awoke from the operation, she found layers of gauze where the breast had been.

The first head-to-head comparison of the nation's two most popular medicines for prostate trouble found that one gives significant relief while the other is virtually worthless. The two medicines, Hytrin and Proscar, are taken by millions of older men to relieve the symptoms of an enlarged prostate gland. The study found that Hytrin eases men's discomfort by about one-third, while Proscar works no better than dummy sugar pills.