The Messe Düsseldorf Group is re-focusing their activities on the health market in Brazil and will organize the first MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL from May 5 – 8, 2020 at  the Expo Center Norte in Sao Paulo. It will be an annual event. MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL is supported by and staged in cooperation with the Brazilian medical technology manufacturers association ABIMO. Messe Düsseldorf’s foreign representation in Brazil is responsible for organizing the event.
 “With Messe Düsseldorf and ABIMO, two strong partners are working on the mutual goal of establishing MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL as Brazil’s leading event platform. Using our global network of 75 foreign representations and 12 affiliated companies or subsidiaries, we promote the event in over 130 countries and contribute our valuable experience in organizing medical trade fairs,” explained Wolfram Diener, Managing Director of Messe Düsseldorf. 
The Messe Düsseldorf Group has been organizing successful healthcare events around the globe for many years. In 2017, these healthcare events were grouped under the new umbrella brand “MEDICAlliance” in order to be marketed as a unit worldwide. In addition to the world-leading trade fair MEDICA and the internationally leading supplier trade fair COMPAMED (held concurrently in Düsseldorf, Germany) , the alliance includes MEDICAL FAIR INDIA (Mumbai/New Delhi), MEDICAL FAIR ASIA (Singapore), MEDICAL FAIR THAILAND (Bangkok) and MEDICAL FAIR CHINA (Suzhou).  
For the South American market, MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL is now being added as a further member of MEDICAlliance. Meditech in Colombia (Bogota) already successfully represents MEDICAlliance in South America. 
 “We know the market and are already well connected in the industry in Brazil thanks to our previous commitments. For us, it is strategically important to have a strong presence on this market with MEDICAlliance. Positive growth prospects and Brazilian business partners, who in our experience are reliable and sincere, are the ideal foundation on which to build a top business,” said Horst Giesen, Global Portfolio Director Health & Medical Technologies at Messe Düsseldorf. The Brazilian market’s volume for medical technology is approximately $ 5.7 billion (source: gtai) and the healthcare industry is among the industries with the highest growth rates in the country.
Paulo Fraccaro, Superintendent at ABIMO, is also looking forward to the cooperation for MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL: “The cooperation between ABIMO and Messe Düsseldorf will bring forth a strong alliance. Together, we are creating the ideal platform for companies to present their innovations and meet relevant decision-makers – both those active in health care as well as manufacturers and distributors in other countries.”
Key exhibit categories at MEDICAL FAIR BRASIL are: Medical technology / medical products, laboratory technology and diagnostics, health IT, physiotherapy and orthopedic technology as well as medical services. The trade fair primarily addresses physicians, medical professionals and managers of health institutions as well as health industry service suppliers and experts in the fields of science, politics, trade and industry.
http://www.medicalfair-brasil.com
www.mdna.com

Brain tumours vary widely in how they respond to treatment. However, early assessment of therapy response is essential in order to choose the best possible treatment for the patient. Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now been able to show in a study using non-invasive high-resolution 7-Tesla MRI scans that the protein content of tumours correlates with response to treatment and survival.
Glioma is the most common type of brain tumour in adults. This non-neuronal type of tumour arises from glial cells – the cells that support and nourish neurons. The term “glioma” comprises a whole number of brain tumours that vary widely in grade. Some are benign and can be removed completely by surgery. In others, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy is necessary in addition to surgical removal.
In about half of all glioma patients, an extremely malignant form of the tumour is diagnosed. “Malignant gliomas respond very diversely to treatment,” says Daniel Paech from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). “In some of the cases, postoperative radiotherapy and chemotherapy are more effective than in others. And whether the tumour has in fact responded to treatment cannot be told before the first follow-up care exam six weeks after treatment ends.”
In order to choose the best possible treatment strategy for the patient right from the start, it would be advantageous to be able to assess a brain tumour’s aggressiveness and future response to therapy already at the time of diagnosis.
In their present study, Paech and his colleagues from Heidelberg University Hospital have now shown that this look into the future, which is so critical for individual therapy planning for glioma patients, in fact seems possible. They used an extremely powerful 7-Tesla MRI scanner to image proteins in the brains of glioma patients. To do so, they exploited the so-called CEST effect, a chemical exchange effect between the proteins and free water in tissue. No contrast agents are needed for this examination.
Paech explains: “Cancer cells grow in an uncontrolled manner, producing proteins along the way in an equally uncontrolled manner. Our study shows that the protein signal measured in the MRI image is a biomarker that is associated with survival as well as with treatment response of patients: The stronger the protein signal, the poorer the prognosis.”
If the MRI image at diagnosis shows that the tumour has a tendency to grow rapidly, it would be possible to choose, depending on other factors such as the patient’s age, a more intensive therapy from the start in order to improve the patient’s chances.
7-Tesla MRI machines of the type that was used for the present study are only available at a small number of research locations. Fewer than 100 of these scanners, which weigh 25 tons and cost over €10 million, are running worldwide. They generate a magnetic field with a strength of 7 Tesla. Conventional MRI scanners used in hospitals have a strength of 1.5 or 3 Tesla. Paech and his DKFZ colleagues from the groups led by Heinz-Peter Schlemmer, Mark Ladd and Peter Bachert are therefore already planning the next study. In a prospective study, they plan to examine in a larger patient group whether protein measurement is also possible using a less powerful MRI scanner. “If a 3-Tesla MRI machine can equally measure the elevated protein expression in the tumour, then our results may be used broadly to enhance diagnostics in glioma patients, because 3-Tesla machines are available in many hospitals,” says Paech.
Relaxation-compensated amide proton transfer (APT) MRI signal intensity is associated with survival and progression in high-grade glioma patients
The German Cancer Research Center https://tinyurl.com/yxw3vvem

A City of Hope scientist and his colleagues have developed a user-friendly approach to creating “theranostics” – therapy combined with diagnostics – that target specific tumours and diseases.
Key to the process are molecules called metallocorroles, which serve as versatile platforms for the development of drugs and imaging agents. City of Hope’s John Termini, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and the Israel Institute of Technology developed a novel method to prepare cell-penetrating nanoparticles called “metallocorrole/protein nanoparticles.” The theranostics could both survive longer in the body and better snipe disease targets.
The study details a unique way the researchers prepared the theranostics that may be generalizable to many similar molecules.
“Through collaborative brainpower, we were able to create something that has huge chemotherapeutic potential,” Termini said. “Down the road, theranostics such as this could shorten treatment duration and diminish the dreaded side effects so many cancer patients fear.”
City of Hope https://tinyurl.com/y67c26em

A new study confirms the long-suspected role of obesity as a risk factor for developing renal cell carcinoma (RCC), a type of kidney cancer, and identifies several specific obesity-related factors.
These factors include multiple measures of obesity, diastolic blood pressure and fasting insulin. In contrast, the study found little evidence for an association with RCC risk for systolic blood pressure, circulating lipids, diabetes or fasting glucose.
“This study provided robust and confirmatory evidence of the important role of obesity and diastolic blood pressure as important risk factors of RCC and novel evidence of an important role of circulating insulin in the disease’s etiology,” said Spectrum Health urologist Richard Kahnoski, MD. “But further research is needed to fully understand these important relationships.”
Renal cell carcinoma is also known as hypernephroma, renal cell cancer and renal cell adenocarcinoma. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 2018 it was estimated that there were 65,340 new cases of kidney and renal pelvis cancer in the U.S. and an estimated 14,970 people died of the disease. Kidney and renal pelvis cancer are the 8th most common cancer type in the U.S., representing 3.8% of all new cancer cases.
The development of RCC has not been fully understood by researchers. An increased risk for the disease has been observed for individuals with high body mass index (BMI), and elevated blood pressure and triglycerides.  However, traditional observational studies are subject to confounding and reverse causation errors. This study used an alternative methodology commonly referred to as mendelian randomization, which allows researchers to test for a causal effect from observational data in the presence of confounding factors.
“These obesity-related factors are inherently interrelated, and traditional observational studies have not been able to determine which individual factors directly influence RCC risk and which are merely correlated with the underlying causal factor,” said Brian Lane, MD, PhD, a board-certified urologist and Betz Family Endowed Chair for Cancer Research at Spectrum Health.
“Mendelian randomization allows us to circumvent many of the limitations of traditional observational study by use of genetic proxies of suspected risk factors.”
Lane, along with Kahnoski and colleague Sabrina Noyes, provided investigative and methodological input into the study, which evaluated genetic markers from multiple centres in a genome-wide association study of 10,784 RCC patients and 20,406 control participants. The markers included obesity measures, blood pressure, lipids, type 2 diabetes, insulin and glucose, which were initially identified as instrumental variables.
Spectrum Health https://tinyurl.com/y2ac73md

A research team, led by investigators from Georgetown University Medical Center and Fudan University in China, has devised a very promising non-invasive and individualized technique for detecting and treating bladder cancer.
The method uses a “liquid biopsy” — a urine specimen — instead of the invasive tumour sampling needed today, and a method developed and patented by Georgetown to culture cancer cells that can reveal the molecular underpinnings of each patient’s unique bladder cancer.
Their study sets forth a cost-friendly, simpler and painless technique that can determine the best treatment for each person’s bladder tumour, monitor the progress of that treatment, predict or detect cancer recurrence early, and identify new drugs that are sorely needed for this common cancer.
“This is the first study to show, using patient samples, that a ‘living liquid biopsy’ from urine can help determine treatment. This work also suggests that we might be able to grow and test cancer cells for treatment from other ‘living biomarkers’ found in blood and saliva. We are just at the beginning of this new diagnostic innovation,” says study co-senior author Xuefeng Liu, MD, professor of pathology and oncology and member of the Center for Cell Reprogramming at Georgetown University and Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The ability to use a patient’s urine to grow cells is a transformational innovation from Georgetown called “conditional reprogramming,” or CR. Patient-derived cells using CR can grow indefinitely without genetic manipulation, says Liu. Before this technique, which is less than a decade old, normal cells could not grow in lab culture, and cancer cells acquired numerous genetic mutations using previous culturing techniques.
“The analysis of the mutation ratio for both patient tissue and corresponding CRC confirmed that both single nucleotide variants and DNA insertions and deletions were retained during the culturing,” says Liu.
This means that a patient’s urine produced cancer cells that molecularly matched their cancer tissue sample. “We also identified some mutations not identified in the original tumour biopsies, suggesting that the urine cell cultures better reflect overall tumour diversity than a single biopsy,” he says. “The CRC technique may also expand our understanding of how low frequency mutations help lead to bladder cancer development and progression. Overall, CRC cultures may identify new actionable drug targets and help explain why this cancer is so often resistant to treatment.”
After determining that the urine colonies and tumour tissue samples had matching molecular characteristics and genetic alterations, the researchers tested urine-based CRC cancer cells with 64 clinical oncology drugs. They found that, overall, the urine-based cancer cells were resistant to more than half of the drugs. And they discovered that many of the urine cancer cells were highly sensitive to one of the drugs, bortezomib, which is currently being tested for a different genitourinary tumour, urothelial cancer.
Georgetown University Medical Center https://tinyurl.com/y46httzz