2021

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have determined the structure of protein “fibrils” linked to Lou Gehrig’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders—findings that provide clues to how toxic proteins clump and spread between nerve cells in the brain. Their results may also lead to developing drugs to […]

KRAS is one of the most common drivers of cancer and is involved in one-third of non-small cell lung cancers. It’s proved an elusive target thanks to its smooth structure and biochemistry. And although new inhibitors are demonstrating some success against one type of KRAS, new paths are needed. A […]

Rice University neurobiologist Rosa Uribe will be hitting the books for her latest study of the digestive system, but some of the pages in her books are a billion years old. Uribe, an assistant professor of biosciences, has won a five-year, $2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to […]

Say you get a CT scan to confirm whether your chest pain is from a fractured rib. You learn a few days later that no bone break was detected – yay! – but joy gives way to anxiety as you read the radiologist’s note, from the same scan, of a […]

A team of Oregon State University scientists has discovered a new class of anti-cancer compounds that effectively kill liver and breast cancer cells. The findings, recently published in the journal Apoptosis, describe the discovery and characterization of compounds, designated as Select Modulators of AhR-regulated Transcription (SMAhRTs). Edmond Francis O’Donnell III […]

COVID-19 can cause significant health problems. At one point it was reported that it can even cause lasting heart damage. And it is true. However, now scientists from UCL found that mild Covid-19 infection is very unlikely to cause lasting damage to the heart. This is good to hear because […]

A comprehensive review into what we know about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called “long-COVID”, struggling with significant health issues months after infection. There is growing […]

Researchers have been able to reduce scarring by blocking part of the healing process in research that could make a significant difference for burns and other trauma patients. University of Queensland Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani said scars had been reduced by targeting the gene that instructs stem cells to form them in an […]

New Cornell-led research finds “little to no evidence” of a link between a person’s normal blood levels of vitamin D and risk of getting COVID-19, or the severity of an infection, in the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. Multiple studies had suggested an association between vitamin D […]

The Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR) has been awarded a major federal grant to lead a national trial of treatments targeting the Renin Angiotensin Aldosterone System (RAAS) in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Comprised of the hormones renin, angiotensin and aldosterone, RAAS is essential for the regulation of […]

Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics. A new bonobo genome assembly […]

For the first time, researchers have found a way to predict when a pregnant woman will go into labor by analyzing immune and other biological signals in a blood sample, according to a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The study, which was published online in Science Translational Medicine, […]