During active surveillance for prostate cancer, your doctor closely monitors your prostate cancer for any changes. Active surveillance for prostate cancer is sometimes called expectant management or watchful waiting.

Sundeep Khosla, M.D, a researcher and physician at Mayo Clinic, has been named the recipient of the 2018 American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) Frontiers in Science Award. Considered the AACE’s highest honor, this award, according to the association, “recognizes an individual who has demonstrated exemplary contributions to their profession or area of expertise.”

The National Institutes of Health is supporting efforts to broaden biomedical scientists’ access to cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), the Nobel Prize-winning imaging method that is revolutionizing structural biology. The Transformative High Resolution Cryo-Electron Microscopy program is creating three national cryo-EM service centers to provide access to the technology and is supporting the development of cryo-EM training curricula to build a skilled workforce. The awards are anticipated to total $129.5 million, pending the availability of funds, and the centers are expected to offer limited services by late 2018 as they build to full capacity.

There are several procedures available to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, including a relatively new treatment that uses steam to reduce the size of the prostate and ease symptoms. This treatment has been shown to effectively eliminate excess prostate tissue, while carrying a low risk of side effects.

A new discovery shows that opioids used to treat pain, such as morphine and oxycodone, produce their effects by binding to receptors inside neurons, contrary to conventional wisdom that they acted only on the same surface receptors as endogenous opioids, which are produced naturally in the brain. However, when researchers funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) used a novel molecular probe to test that common assumption, they discovered that medically used opioids also bind to receptors that are not a target for the naturally occurring opioids. NIDA is part of the National Institutes of Health.

A new procedural skills lab in the Mayo Clinic J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Simulation Center at Mayo Clinic in Florida will help staff learn and perfect various clinical procedures, including joint arthroscopy, spinal taps and kidney removal. In addition, participants in the lab will experiment, learn and refine new procedures on tissue from cadavers.