Biological Dynamics announces a collaboration with OHSU on an early-stage pancreatic cancer study. Rosie Sears, Ph.D., says “Finding tumors at an earlier stage will provide the opportunity for prompt neoadjuvant therapy followed by targeted interception with potentially curative minimally invasive surgical techniques to optimize survival and quality of life”

Stories explaining recent social media hype about the herbal supplement ashwagandha quote Amala Soumyanath, B.Pharm., Ph.D., who says: “While more confirmatory studies are needed, research in humans and preclinical models suggest that ashwagandha can improve sleep and reduce, stress, anxiety and depression.”

A team of OHSU Knight Cancer Institute researchers, led by Jeff Tyner, Ph.D., offers advice on best practices for data collection and analysis to the Portland Police Bureau regarding their stolen vehicle operations. Tyner says: “Police are collecting and using data to make their process more precise and more efficient. That’s exactly the same thing we do here in cancer research.”

In an interview with the OHA’s Oregon Health News, featuring Oregonians reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, George Keepers, M.D., provides tips and perspective about the impact on our mental health and social skills; he says, “I’m quite optimistic about our ability to recover from COVID-19; it just takes a while for people to get comfortable again.”

GenomeWeb profiles research led by Andrew Adey, Ph.D., which aims to improve their capability to perform combinatorial indexing-based single-cell assays for chromatin accessibility and methylation.

Martha Neuringer, Ph.D., John Brigande, Ph.D., and colleagues have developed the first nonhuman primate model for Usher syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes deafness and blindness. Brigande says: “This model’s creation is truly a momentous scientific achievement. It should be shouted from Everest”

David Jacoby, M.D., is highlighted in a subsequent feature as a leader of one of the top primary care schools.

In a story about how teaching hospitals are responding to nursing shortages, Christine Bartlett, M.S.N., RN, says: “It’s taken the pandemic -- a huge health care crisis -- to look at how we can move nursing to the next level. We know doing it the same old way isn’t going to work anymore”

Dollar For report cites OHSU as an exception among Oregon hospitals that are not meaningfully screening patients for their eligibility for financial assistance, noting that OHSU “has proven that if hospitals take their burden to screen patients seriously they can increase financial assistance without affecting profitability”

An OHSU health care team is trying a different approach to caring for patients who have, or are at risk for, Hepatitis C, with a goal of overcoming barriers that can otherwise make receiving testing and treatment seem impossible. An organizer of the pilot project, Jane Babiarz, M.D., says: “A number of patients have become tearful when we’re discussing treatment. Patients have said, ‘I never thought I was going to get treated for Hepatitis C. No one has ever treated me like a person before or acted like this matters’”