NEW YORK - Talk about an extreme makeover: Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.

The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.

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THURSDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Blogs written by medical professionals may pose a threat to patient privacy, because the authors of the blogs may inadvertently reveal patient information, says a U.S. study that's the first to examine the issue.

The researchers analyzed the contents of 271 medical blogs and found that 56.8 percent contained enough information to reveal the author's identity.

THURSDAY, June 26 (HealthDay News) -- Women with metastatic breast cancer who developed an immune response to an investigational vaccine lived twice as long as those who didn't have an immune response, new research shows.

"If you were an immune responder, you had double the survival of a non-responder," said study author Dr. Susan Domchek, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.