It’s important everyone get vaccinated and boosted, Drs. Meagan Berman and Richard Rupp wrote in their Vaccine Smarts column. Some may wish to be boosted with a different vaccine, but in the end, it’s just important to get whichever is available.

Without needles and without incisions, UTMB Galveston will be the first to treat prostate cancer with this new procedure.

Even when disease or injury prevents a person from speaking, typing or walking, the brain remembers how to do these things. These memories of doing things are called neural processes. The trick is to tap into the neural processes to regain those functions, Drs. Norbert Herzog and David Niesel wrote in their Medical Discovery News column.

Prior studies have shown that residents who receive care from full-time clinical staff have fewer avoidable hospitalizations and lower Medicare spending. Full-time providers also are better positioned to evaluate and intervene after a change in clinical status. “This has led some nursing homes to hire full-time nurse practitioners and to pay more for medical directors that are more present in the facility,” said researcher Dr. James S. Goodwin of the Sealy Center on Aging, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “In addition, nursing home residents and their families also prefer providers who are available.”

The National Academy of Inventors has announced its annual set of NAI Fellows—and six Houstonians made the list of the 164 honorees from 116 research institutions worldwide. One is Pei-Yong Shi, University of Texas Medical Branch professor and John Sealy Distinguished Chair in Innovations in Molecular Biology, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. He's also the vice chair for Innovation and Commercialization.

There's hope that a third shot of an mRNA vaccine—a so-called booster—will work better than two shots, says virologist Pei-Yong Shi at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who works with Pfizer. First off, he says, the third dose doesn't just return your antibody levels to what they were after the second shot. The level is even higher. On top of that, the booster can actually help broaden out your defenses so that you can fight off not just one variant of SARS-CoV-2 but many different versions of it. "The booster increases the level of antibodies that can push back against the variants," Shi says. "So that's another advantage to the booster."

Over the past two weeks, omicron has spread to at least seven of South Africa's nine provinces, quickly overtaking the country's outbreak—and thus, it appears, outcompeting delta, says virologist Pei-Yong Shi of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “Based on the epidemiology data, it seems like the new variant has advantages in transmitting over the previous variants,” Shi said.

Dr. Pei-Yong Shi was referenced in the magazine’s coverage about the omicron variant.

Dr. Pei-Yong Shi discussed the new variant on Houston Matters, a radio program on Houston Public Media.

The speedy detection and the rapid response of global health authorities shows how the world’s fight against COVID-19 has evolved. Scientists are now focused on finding new variants. In the case of Omicron, one was beginning to spread in South Africa, a nation with the resources to identify it—and the political will to announce it to the world. Experiments using infectious virus or that tease out the effect of individual mutations on its behavior will take more time, but research that looks at the interactions between Omicron’s mutant spike and antibodies should yield some answers on the immune evasion question in as little as a week, said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch.