Washington — As the U.S. continues to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said areas of the country could experience “very dense outbreaks” with the concerning Delta variant continuing to circulate.

“It’s going to be hyper-regionalized, where there are certain pockets of the country [where] we can have very dense outbreaks,” Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

The most vulnerable areas continue to be those with low vaccination rates and low rates of immunity from prior infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many southern states have vaccination rates that lag behind the national average.

Investigators at Cedars-Sinai and UC San Diego found that a synthetic compound given orally protected the liver against injury in an animal model for alcoholic hepatitis.

The study, co-authored by Dr. Ekihiro Seki, was published in the Proceedings of the Na… See More.

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The most prevalent forms of ALD are fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis and cirrhosis. Corticosteroids are the only treatment option for alcoholic hepatitis, or chronic inflammation of the liver, despite little evidence of long-term efficacy and considerable adverse side effects.

Investigators at Cedars-Sinai and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), found that a synthetic compound given orally protected the liver against injury in an animal model for alcoholic hepatitis. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ekihiro Seki, MD, PhD of Cedars-Sinai and Dennis A. Carson, MD, of UCSD are co-senior authors of the paper.

“Interleukin-22 (IL-22) is a beneficial cytokine that can help protect the body against invading pathogens, repair damage caused by intestinal or liver disease and potentially prevent the development of ALD,” said Seki, professor of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

This research places the circadian clock as a central regulator of glucose production during lung cancer progression and provides important insight toward the development of novel therapeutics to target REV-ERBα to suppress cancer cell growth.

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New research from the University of California, Irvine reveals how the circadian regulation of glucose production in the liver is lost during lung cancer progression, and how the resulting increase in glucose production may fuel cancer cell growth.

The new study titled, “Glucagon regulates the stability of REV-ERBα to modulate hepatic glucose production in a model of lung cancer-associated cachexia,” published today in Science Advances, illustrates how the circadian clock is regulated under conditions of stress such as during lung cancer progression and cancer-associated tissue wasting disease called cachexia.

“Our research shows that a critical circadian protein, REV-ERBα, controls glucose production in the liver. During lung cancer progression and specifically under conditions of cachexia, this circadian regulation is lost, resulting in increased glucose production from the liver,” said senior author Selma Masri, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at UCI School of Medicine. “Based on our findings, we identified that lung tumors are able to provide instructive cues to the liver to increase glucose production, a major fuel source for cancer cells.”