In the first clinical study of a new blood protein associated with prostate cancer, researchers have found that the marker, called EPCA or early prostate cancer antigen, can successfully detect prostate cancer in its earliest stages. At the same time, the marker successfully avoids the problem of false positive results that plagues prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing.

Study results appear in the May 15, 2005, issue of Cancer Research. The lead author is Robert H. Getzenberg, Ph.D., professor of urology and director of research at the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was "the single greatest obstacle to doing anything effective" about Vioxx, said FDA drug safety officer David Graham at an unprecedented roundtable of medical whistleblowers sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Government Accountability Project.

In comments that echoed his now infamous testimony to the US Senate Finance Committee, Graham said that, "Nearly 60,000 people probably died from that drug. That's as many of our soldiers that were killed in the Vietnam war [who] died as a result of Vioxx use. And FDA had the opportunity, the responsibility, to stop that and didn't."

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of five clinical centers nationwide to receive funds from the National Institutes of Health to study why good medications are sometimes bad for the liver.

During the next seven years, the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, or DILIN, will study patients who have suffered severe liver injury caused by prescription and over-the-counter medications, nutritional supplements, alternative medicines and herbals.

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Md., reports that whole-body positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scans may help physicians identify new, unexpected malignant cancerous tumors in patients, according to an article in the May issue of the Society of Nuclear Medicine's Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

With the unusual opportunity that human leprosy infections provide for study of human immune responses, scientists have discovered how the body's early warning system prompts a rapid immune response by two separate armies of defensive cells. The finding helps explain why, when threatened by microbes like the leprosy bug, this initial defense sometimes succeeds in limiting the damage, but in other cases yields to a dangerous, spreading infection.