2021

A team of researchers co-led by Michael Frohman of Stony Brook University has identified an important cause of congenital heart disease. The researchers discovered that certain loss of functions in the PLD1 (phospholipase D1) gene causes congenital right-sided cardiac valve defects and neonatal cardiomyopathy. The findings are detailed in a paper in […]

Researchers are perfecting a new generation of anticancer drugs that will be able to specifically target the low-oxygen environment of solid tumors. So far, the new drug has been tested in preliminary experiments with human tumors transplanted into otherwise healthy adult mice. Low oxygen levels among the densely packed cells […]

A study with first-time learners of Japanese has measured how brain activity changes after just a few months of studying a new language. The results show that acquiring a new language initially boosts brain activity, which then reduces as language skills improve. “In the first few months, you can quantitatively […]

People previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 show significantly higher T cell and antibody responses following a single dose of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine compared with uninfected individuals, a collaborative study involving University of Liverpool researchers has found, While both groups show robust immune responses after one dose, the higher response experienced by previously […]

A rare isotope in high demand for treating cancer is now more available to pharmaceutical companies developing and testing new drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently acknowledged receipt of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s drug master file for actinium-225 nitrate, which enables pharmaceutical companies to reference the document to […]

Cholinesterase inhibitors are a group of drugs recommended for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, but their effects on cognition have been debated and few studies have investigated their long-term effects. A new study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet and published in the journal Neurology shows persisting cognitive benefits and reduced […]

Sydney researchers are testing whether an existing medication could be repurposed to treat sarcoma. Recruitment is now open for a national clinical trial that will test whether an existing therapy for psoriasis can help treat patients with sarcomas, which are rare cancers arising in the connective tissues (bone, muscle, tendons, […]

New clues to a long-pursued drug target in cancer may reside within immune cells, researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center have discovered. The findings, which appear in Nature Immunology, not only shed new light on cancer immunology, they also suggest clinical trials related to this key target — an interaction that […]

Scientists have genetically engineered immune cells, called myeloid cells, to precisely deliver an anticancer signal to organs where cancer may spread. In a study of mice, treatment with the engineered cells shrank tumors and prevented the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. The study, led by scientists […]

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have discovered specific regions within the DNA of neurons that accumulate a certain type of damage (called single-strand breaks or SSBs). This accumulation of SSBs appears to be unique to neurons, and it challenges what is generally understood about the cause of […]

A recent study published in JCI found that a neutrophil’s endoplasmic reticulum, the organelle that normally makes proteins in the cell, becomes stressed in the autoimmune disorder lupus. This stress activates a molecule called IRE1α, which appears to play a critical role in lupus pathogenesis in mice. A multidisciplinary research group at the University […]

Scientists are preparing a cancer modeling study to run on Argonne’s upcoming Aurora supercomputer before it goes online in 2022. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will be home to one of the nation’s first exascale supercomputers when Aurora arrives in 2022. To prepare codes for the architecture and scale of […]