General

Canada's Advance MAID Bill Canada's government has paired an expansion of its assisted dying law with a retreat in a single bill. The MAID Safeguards Act, introduced in Ottawa on Tuesday as Bill C-41, would let adults request medical assistance in dying in advance of losing decision-making capacity, while cancelling […]

Mayo Clinic's Zombie Cell Studies Not all aging cells cause the same harm, and scientists now have better ways to tell them apart. A set of seven Mayo Clinic studies shows that senescent, or “zombie,” cells form many distinct types. The papers trace how these cells fuel inflammation and test […]

AI and Early Pancreatic Cancer Every scan in the study had already been read and cleared as normal. Yet hidden in them were signs of a deadly cancer. Mayo Clinic researchers reported in the journal Gut that their AI model, REDMOD, found pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans an average […]

Alcohol Risk in Numbers The US government asked researchers to measure alcohol's toll before rewriting its dietary advice. The final guidelines dropped specific drinking limits, and the commissioned work now stands on its own in a peer-reviewed journal. The Alcohol Intake and Health Study puts the lifetime risk of dying […]

Aspirin, Genes and Dementia Daily aspirin failed to prevent dementia in one of the largest trials ever run in healthy older adults. A fresh look at the same volunteers' DNA suggests the drug may still help a narrow group. Monash University researchers report that low-dose aspirin was linked to a […]

Immunotherapy for dMMR Rectal Cancer Chemotherapy, radiation and surgery cure many rectal cancers, but the price can include infertility, lifelong bowel trouble or a permanent colostomy. For a small group of patients whose tumors carry a specific DNA repair defect, the FDA has granted accelerated approval to GSK's Jemperli (dostarlimab-gxly) […]

New findings on how neurons find their targets during development provide a potential step forward for understanding how to repair broken neural connections. A new discovery by neuroscientists at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science challenges long-held beliefs in neurobiology about how neurons extend axons to reach their targets. […]

Brown Fat Linked to a Healthier Body and Mind A pill that millions of people take for high blood pressure may also switch on the body's heat-burning fat. That lead came out of the largest study of human brown fat so far, in which researchers used AI to analyze PET/CT […]

A researcher from the University of Liverpool and The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust has led a major trial which could change treatment for patients with atypical meningioma. Chief investigator, Professor Michael Jenkinson led the work which illustrates administering radiotherapy after surgery for a type of brain tumour called atypical […]

Neuroscientist Tomáš Paus investigates the effect of smoking during pregnancy on the size of the baby’s visual cortex and uncovers a mechanism never before observed in humans. We tend to think of a fetus’s brain as a construction site guided by a blueprint imprinted in the genes. But even before […]

With a new focused ultrasound clinical trial underway, Fred Wu hopes to play his part in revolutionizing the way we treat pediatric brain cancer. To solve some of the trickiest, most deadly brain cancers in the world, Cheng-Chia “Fred” Wu is combining technology and medicine in an unconventional way: he’s […]

A new clinical trial targeting sarcoids — the most common and persistent equine skin tumor — could advance noninvasive tumor therapies for both animals and people. There is no “one-fix-for-all” solution for sarcoids, said Sophie Bogers, an assistant professor of large animal surgery. Many of them require chemotherapy or invasive surgery. […]

By Alius Noreika Key takeaways A trial that exists only on paper The Targeting Aging with Metformin trial was designed by Nir Barzilai and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, coordinated through Wake Forest University School of Medicine and championed by the American Federation for Aging Research. The design […]

By Alius Noreika Key takeaways What the study found Researchers led by Danica Chen, professor of metabolic biology and nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley, gave semaglutide to female mice beginning at 20 months of age and continued treatment for the remainder of their lives. The paper, titled “Late-life semaglutide […]

Doctors have long sought the ability to deliver drugs and molecules exactly where, and when, the body needs them. However, solutions that can accomplish all of that have been hard to come by. Cracking this problem could bring new precision to therapeutics across a wide range of injuries and reduce […]

The human brain is terrible at healing itself from injury or disease. But some animals can harness their own cellular abilities to not only repair injuries but also to regrow their brains entirely. Researchers from the University of Georgia have pinpointed several of the genes that make brain regeneration possible […]

A new biomaterial developed by researchers from The University of Western Australia is providing fresh insights into the way cancer cells escape from tumours and spread through the body. Metastasis – the development of malignant growths distant from the original cancer site – is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths […]

In the new method, cells package and export their RNA, enabling researchers to sequence and analyze the RNA without killing the cells. In recent years, scientists have built methods to measure a cell’s transcriptome, or all the RNA produced by a cell, to study the cell’s identity and genetic activity. […]

Human Cortex Grown Inside Mice Stanford University researchers removed most of the cortex from developing mice and let human brain organoid cells fill the gap. The resulting animals did better than cortex-free mice on several tests, yet they still trailed normal mice, and the human tissue never formed the layered […]

Written by Vytautas Valinskas Key takeaways Two results, one week apart, and very different evidence On 26 August the US Food and Drug Administration approved Rasonque, the brand name for daraxonrasib, for adults with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma who have already had one systemic therapy or cannot take combination chemotherapy. One week […]

When a cell gets ready to divide, it shuts down its gene-reading machinery almost entirely. “As cells prepare to divide, they rapidly shut down most gene reading, or transcription,” says Claudio R. Alarcón, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine. “At that point, the cell needs to focus […]

USC researchers found that exposure to common air pollutants was associated with different patterns of cortical thickness in two groups of older adults, pointing to a potentially complex relationship between pollution, aging, and brain health. Exposure to common forms of outdoor air pollution may be linked to structural changes in […]