Issue

Designing effective immunotherapies that target and destroy cancer tumors but avoid systemic toxicity has posed a challenge for researchers. A team at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) in New York City believes it has found a safe alternative. In Nature Medicine, the researchers describe how they…

Designed to target the smallest of myocardial injuries, high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) assays have presented new challenges for clinicians in emergency department (ED) settings. These tests can’t always differentiate between patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI) or some other type of myocardial injury, and there are issues surrounding the timing…

Electronic health record (EHR) portals offer a flexible tool for patients to schedule appointments, request prescription refills, or view diagnostic test results online. Yet these convenient online resources also pose challenges when patients either misinterpret or dispute what they find. Matthew D. Krasowski, MD, PhD discusses in the June Clinical…

Joint draft guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Academy of Neurology, and the American College of Rheumatology outline the limitations of Lyme disease testing, recommending that clinicians hold off on testing asymptomatic patients. Two-tier serologic testing for Lyme disease (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay with reflex…

As vacancy rates continue to rise across all lab disciplines, the rapidly developing field of molecular diagnostics stands out as a growth area, offering lab professionals opportunities to improve their skills and advance professionally, according to the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) 2018 vacancy survey of U.S. medical labs.…

Quality control (QC) is essential to reducing patient risk and ensuring a laboratory’s credibility. Advances in instrumentation have led to significant changes in the way laboratories perform QC. To reduce errors and repeat testing, and encourage the use of risk-based algorithms and other state-of-the art technology, the International Federation of…