2025

Multiple clinical trials have demonstrated that glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 Ras) improve symptoms, physical function, and potentially reduce hospitalizations in selected populations with HFpEF. However, the effectiveness of GLP-1 RAs in real-world populations with HFpEF is not well-characterized. Research Questions/Hypothesis: To evaluate the association between GLP-1 RA use and clinical outcomes in patients with…

Tumor-draining lymph nodes are a pivotal site for antitumor T-cell priming. However, their mechanistic roles in cancer immune surveillance and immunotherapy response remain poorly defined. Intratumor (IT) virotherapy generates antitumor T-cell immunity through multifaceted engagement of innate antiviral inflammation. Here we identify type-I interferon (IFN-I) signaling in glioma-draining cervical lymph nodes as a mediator of…

Children and young adults with HGGs have limited treatment options and a dismal prognosis, underscoring the critical need to develop novel, biologically-rational, and minimally toxic therapies for this vulnerable population. Genome-wide discoveries have provided valuable insight into the underlying biology of pediatric HGG/DIPG, identifying recurrent, actionable somatic alterations within molecularly distinct subgroups. We have developed…

Lerapolturev is a modified, non-pathogenic version of the Sabin™ type 1 poliovirus vaccine that infects myeloid compartments within the tumor microenvironment to generate antitumor immunity by stimulating tumor antigen cross-presentation, dendritic cell homing to lymph nodes, and priming of CD8+ T cells in glioma models. This immunity can be boosted by repeated perilymphatic lerapolturev injections…

With a bleak prognosis for malignant glioma, maintaining quality of life (QoL) and decreasing distress are essential in patient clinical care. Mindfulness meditation is a mind-body therapy that is being investigated as a non-pharmacological strategy to alleviate cancer symptoms and improve QoL. Given the potential of this intervention, we hypothesized that mindfulness meditation is feasible…

This work describes a publicly available dataset, the Duke University Cervical Spine MRI Segmentation Dataset (CSpineSeg), consisting of 1,255 cervical spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations from 1,232 patients collected from the Duke University Health System. CSpineSeg also includes expert manual semantic segmentations of vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs for 481 patients. This dataset aims…

Developing computable phenotypes (CP) based on electronic health records (EHR) data requires “gold-standard” labels for the outcome of interest. To generate these labels, clinicians typically chart-review a subset of patient charts. Charts to be reviewed are most often randomly sampled from the larger set of patients of interest. However, random sampling may fail to capture…

Temporal awareness underlies intelligent behavior in both animals and humans, guiding how actions are sequenced, paced, and adapted to changing goals and environments. Yet most robot learning algorithms remain blind to time. We introduce time-aware policy learning, a reinforcement learning framework that enables robots to explicitly perceive and reason with time as a first-class variable….

Surgical resection of malignant solid tumors is critically dependent on the surgeon’s ability to accurately identify pathological tissue and remove the tumor while preserving surrounding healthy structures. However, building an intraoperative 3D tumor model for subsequent removal faces major challenges due to the lack of high-fidelity tumor reconstruction, difficulties in developing generalized tissue models to…