OHSU has received $7.5 million in federal funding to increase treatment and prevention of hepatitis C, HIV and substance abuse disorders.

Alexander Davies, D.V.M., Ph.D., receives a $3.2 million grant from the NIH to research cures for osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer that primarily impacts children. Prior to receiving the NIH grant, Davies received $150,000 in gap funding from the Sam Day Foundation last year; Davies says: "It’s hard to get pediatric research funding as a whole, so we were excited to drive this program forward.”

In an ENT Today article on the potential impact of two emerging innovations -- gene therapy for auditory and vestibular disorders and growing recognition and acceptance of retrograde cricopharyngeal dysfunction (RCPD) — Joshua Schindler, M.D., says he treated his first patient with suspected RCPD in 2019 after reviewing the Bastian paper and concluding that the potential benefit outweighed the risk. He says the patient was thrilled with the result, and he’s since treated numerous other RCPD cases—sometimes as many as four a day—with 95% of his referrals coming from Reddit.

OHSU scientists develop a sophisticated blood test that is 97% effective in revealing pancreatic cancer; the study’s senior author Stuart Ibsen, Ph.D., says, "Pancreatic cancer is really hard to detect because the pancreas is so deep inside the body … It’s not like skin cancer you can see or a lump that you can feel. Most of the time, when the tumors do get big enough to start causing problems like jaundice or abdominal pain, it’s very advanced by that point”

A multi-center study led at OHSU by Nima Nabavizadeh, M.D., finds a single blood test designed to screen for multiple cancer types boosted detection for a variety of cancers by seven-fold, when added to standard screening for breast, cervical, colorectal and lung cancers. Nabavizadeh says: "The majority of cancers, seven in 10, that were diagnosed with the multiple cancer early detection (MCED) test did not have recommended screening options and almost half were very early-stage cancers.”

Research led by Amanda Clark, M.D., finds a basic menopause curriculum developed for telementoring health care professionals in rural and under-resourced areas improved confidence in treating patients with menopause and addressed a knowledge gap among clinicians: Dermatology Advisor.

Jonah Sacha, Ph.D., Louis Picker, M.D., and colleagues report some rhesus macaque monkeys given gene therapy controlled their infections with an HIV-like virus for many months; Sacha says: "There’s a love story between HIV and CCR5, and if you can stop HIV from accessing its dance partner, it’s not going to tango.” Picker says: “It’s exciting but still early, and more work will be needed. I hope the money is there to work out the devil’s details.”

The OHSU Knight Cancer Institute sponsors "A Time for Hope,” a one-mile walk/fundraiser intended to support Crook County residents on cancer journeys.

Aheng Xia, Ph.D., and colleagues develop a first-of-its-kind tool called scSurvival that directly links information from individual tumor cells to patient survival outcomes, allowing clinicians to understand which specific cells are driving disease progression rather than treating them all the same; Xia says: "Traditional survival models in cancer rely on bulk data, which average signals across millions of cells and obscure important heterogeneity. Tumors are highly complex ecosystems where different cell subpopulations can have very different and sometimes opposing effects on patient outcomes.”

Aheng Xia, Ph.D., and colleagues develop a first-of-its-kind tool called scSurvival that directly links information from individual tumor cells to patient survival outcomes, allowing clinicians to understand which specific cells are driving disease progression rather than treating them all the same; Xia says: "Traditional survival models in cancer rely on bulk data, which average signals across millions of cells and obscure important heterogeneity. Tumors are highly complex ecosystems where different cell subpopulations can have very different and sometimes opposing effects on patient outcomes.”