Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
A new palm-sized microarray that holds 1,200 individual cultures of fungi or bacteria could enable faster, more efficient drug discovery, according to a study published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
US scientists say they have made progress in repairing spinal cord injuries in paralysed rats.
Rats regained some bladder control after surgery to transplant nerve cells into the spinal cord, combined with injections of a cocktail of chemicals. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, could raise hopes for one day treating paralysed patients.
But UK experts say it will take several years of research before human clinical trials can be considered.
Scientists have tried for decades to use transplants of nerve cells to restore function in paralysed animals by bridging the gap in the broken spinal cord.
Death rates from coronary heart disease have more than halved in almost all EU countries since the early 1980s, according to research.
Most countries have seen steady reductions in deaths in both men and women of all ages, despite rises in obesity and diabetes, a UK study shows.
However, experts have warned against complacency, saying wide disparities remain across Europe.
Coronary heart disease is the UK's single biggest killer.
About one in five men and one in eight women die from the disease.
Scientists in the US have developed a novel vaccination method that uses tiny gold particles to mimic a virus and carry specific proteins to the body's specialist immune cells.
The technique differs from the traditional approach of using dead or inactive viruses as a vaccine and was demonstrated in the lab using a specific protein that sits on the surface of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
The results have been published today, 26 June, in IOP Publishing's journal Nanotechnology by a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University.
A new study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has revealed that dietary fructose (fruit sugar) rapidly causes liver damage in an animal model.
“Is a calorie a calorie? Are they all created equal? Based on this study, we would say not,” said lead author Dr Kylie Kavanagh from Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Dr Kavanagh with colleagues found that over the 6-week study period liver damage more than doubled in the animals fed a high-fructose diet as compared to those in the control group.
A new class of experimental drug-like small molecules is showing great promise in targeting a brain enzyme to prevent early memory loss in Alzheimer's disease, according to Northwestern Medicine research.
It may be possible to reverse type 1 diabetes by training a patient's own immune system to stop attacking their body, an early trial suggests.
Their immune system destroys the cells that make insulin, the hormone needed to control blood sugar levels.
A study in 80 patients, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, showed a vaccine could retrain their immune system.
Experts described the results as a "significant step".
Normally a vaccine teaches the immune system to attack bacteria or viruses that cause disease, such as the polio virus.
A prototype device created by John Hopkins University grad students can enable a pathologist to inspect excised breast tissue mid-surgery to determine whether a cancerous tumor has been fully removed.
The prototype's ability to dramatically reduce the time to inspect breast tissue -- down to as quickly as 20 minutes -- could ultimately decrease, if not flat out eliminate, the need for a second operation on the same tumor, John Hopkins announced this week
Circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse were used to produce the clone, a team at the Riken BioResource Center reports in the journal Biology of Reproduction.
(UNDATED) - Doctors tell you to use sunscreen every day to avoid skin cancer, but there could be a new weapon against the most dangerous form of the disease.
A vaccine for melanoma passed its initial human trial without causing any adverse side effects, according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Researchers at Duke University and Merck Laboratories are injecting dendritic cells into patients, the cells that are part of our immune system that normally protects us from disease. "You take a protein from the melanoma that was always there but the immune system couldn't see, and you enhance the ability of the immune system to see it," said Dr. Ruemu Birhiray, an oncologist at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis.
June 30, 2013 — Researchers at EPFL have built a matchbox-sized device that can test for the presence of bacteria in a couple of minutes, instead of up to several weeks. A nano-lever vibrates in the presence of bacterial activity, while a laser reads the vibration and translates it into an electrical signal that can be easily read -- the absence of a signal signifies the absence of bacteria. Thanks to this method, it is quick and easy to determine if a bacteria has been effectively treated by an antibiotic, a crucial medical tool especially for resistant strains. Easily used in clinics, it could also prove useful for testing chemotherapy treatment.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY: Quote) and Pfizer Inc. (PFE: Quote) Sunday said its anti-clotting drug Eliquis proved to be as effective as standard therapy and caused significantly less bleeding complications in in treating patients with acute venous thromboembolism.
Eliquis met the main endpoint of the trial by demonstrating that it is not inferior to the current standard of care, ainitial parenteral enoxaparin treatment overlapped with warfarin therapy, in the reduction of recurrence of acute venous thromboembolism, or VTE, and related deaths.
Eliquis also met the primary safety endpoint of superiority for major bleeding, with a 69 percent relative risk reduction compared to current standard of care.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the western world. Unfortunately, conventional optical aids provide little help for a retina which has lost the acuity of its central area. Now a team of multinational researchers led by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Professor Joseph Ford has created a telescopic contact lens that can switch between normal and magnified vision to offer AMD patients a relatively unobtrusive way to enhance their vision.
ANN ARBOR (WWJ) - Could a drug used to treat canker sores be a miracle weight-loss solution? Researchers at University of Michigan are working to find out.
Back in February, U-M researchers discovered that mice given the prescription drug, Amlexanox, lost weight without diet or exercise.
Now, Dr. Elif Oral, an associate professor of internal medicine at U-M’s Metabolism, Endocrinology & Diabetes (MEND) division, is beginning the first human study to determine whether the drug will have the same effect in people.
“The weight loss together in improved glucose metabolism makes this even more interesting, you know, and more exciting,” Oral told WWJ Health Reporter Sean Lee. “We’re going to start out by targeting the diabetic population because that’s the population that needs more immediate help.”
The study is small, enrolling just 10 obese people with Type 2 diabetes. If that goes well, the next study will enroll more people.
The Argus II, which treats patients with the rare genetic condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, was approved by the FDA in February after more than 20 years in the making.
After more than 20 years in the making and FDA approval in February, the Argus II bionic eye is finally here. Well, almost. Developer Second Sight says it has selected clinical centers in 12 U.S. markets where it will begin rolling out the groundbreaking technology later this year.
Tweezers are a handy instrument when it comes to removing a splinter or plucking an eyebrow. In new research, Hao Yan and his colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute describe a pair of tweezers shrunk down to an astonishingly tiny scale. When the jaws of these tools are in the open position, the distance between the two arms is about 16 nanometers—over 30,000 times smaller than a single grain of sand.
The group demonstrated that the nanotweezers, fabricated by means of the base-pairing properties of DNA, could be used to keep biological molecules spatially separated or to bring them together as chemical reactants, depending on the open or closed state of the tweezers.
The promise of curing any number of human ailments through the use of stem cells has been slow going, but a new breakthrough offers hope that the age of organ donation may soon come to an end. Japanese scientists at Yokohama City University have announced that for the first time stem cells have been used to create a working human liver.
Published in this week's Nature journal, the researchers wrote, "To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the generation of a functional human organ from pluripotent stem cells." Grown gradually over the course of two months, iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) treated to function as liver cells organized into an early stage version of a liver. According to the scientists, once transplanted into test mice, the liver cells grew into what appeared to be the early stages of an adult human liver.
Japanese scientists have cracked open a freaky new chapter in the sci-fi-meets-stem-cells era. A group in Yokohama reported it has grown a primitive liver in a petri dish using a person's skin cells.
Still, this rudimentary liver is the first complex, functioning organ to be grown in the lab from human, skin-derived stem cells. When the scientists transplanted the organ into a mouse, it worked a lot like a regular human liver.
"It's a huge step forward," George Daley, from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, tells NPR's Rob Stein.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed the first method for directly measuring the extent to which drugs reach their targets in the cell. The method, which is described in the scientific journal Science, could make a significant contribution to the development of new, improved drug substances.
Most drugs operate by binding to one or more proteins and affecting their function, which creates two common bottlenecks in the development of drugs; identifying the right target proteins and designing drug molecules able to efficiently seek out and bind to them. No method has been available for directly measuring the efficiency of the drug molecules to locate and bind to its target protein. Now researchers from Karolinska Institutet have developed a new tool called CETSA (Cellular Thermal Shift Assay), which utilise the concept that target proteins usually get stabilised when drug molecules bind.
The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is joining a consortium of organizations in Europe to develop a completely novel approach to fighting cancer.
The Glioma Actively Personalized Vaccine Consortium, which is supported by a grant from the European Union, is the first initiative aimed at clinically developing biomarker-guided actively personalized vaccines, or APVACs, to treat cancer patients.
A new drug has been approved to battle mantle cell lymphoma, an aggressive cancer often fatal because of its resistance to treatment, after a study led by a Hackensack University Medical Center physician showed it can stop the progression of the disease in about a quarter of the patients.
Revlimid, a drug taken orally, was granted approval by the Food and Drug Administration last month after a study led by Dr. Andre Goy involving 134 patients showed 26 percent of patients responded to the medication. Nine patients showed a complete remission by the end of the clinical trial, according to the FDA.
Before the study, all of the patients had been treated with chemotherapy and their disease had either never regressed or had returned, Goy said.
"Patients were heavily pretreated and were a poor risk," Goy said. "That's why this is so important. Many of these patients had few other options."
