General

Nearly 3,000 Canadians are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease or Charcot's disease. Each year, close to 1,000 people are diagnosed with ALS and as many will die from it. ALS is an incurable neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the selective loss of motor neurons. […]

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara, University of Southern California (USC), and the biotechnology company Regenerative Patch Technologies LLC (RPT) have reported new methodology for the preservation of RPT’s stem cell-based therapy for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The new research, recently published in Scientific Reports(link is external), optimizes the conditions to cryopreserve, […]

Treatment options for a deadly liver cancer, fibrolamellar carcinoma, are severely lacking. Drugs that work on other liver cancers are not effective, and although progress has been made in identifying the specific genes involved in driving the growth of fibrolamellar tumors, these findings have yet to translate into any treatment. […]

The term “doomscrolling” describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic. The biology of our brains may play a role in that. Researchers at Washington […]

Children growing up with HIV infection have concerning deficits in skeletal strength which become more apparent towards the end of pubertal growth, finds the largest study to date to investigate the link between HIV and skeletal health in children. The study, conducted in Zimbabwe and published in The Lancet Child […]

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a degenerative disease of the macula, the central area of the retina. There is currently no cure for the disease and it is characterised by a gradual loss of central vision and is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries in people over the […]

Two teams of scientists from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, have won first and second place in NASA's Vascular Tissue Challenge. The prize competition aims to accelerate tissue engineering innovations to benefit people on Earth today and space explorers in the future. Competing as teams […]

In early 2020, when the novel coronavirus was gaining momentum but had not yet been named a pandemic, computational chemist Marti Head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory – along with scientists and researchers around the globe – abruptly switched her focus to the fight against COVID-19. The world was struggling to understand this new […]

Using chemical synthesis, Bright Peak Therapeutics can produce proteins that have never before existed. This holds great potential for cancer immunotherapy. The Basel-​based spin-off has its beginnings at ETH Zurich. Jeffrey Bode’s long, bold journey began over an after-work beer in Tokyo. A biologist friend said to the then postdoc, […]

Vaccine generates robust immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 variants. In the three months since Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine was granted an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, more than 10 million Americans have received the vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […]

Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed nanotechnology that can serve as a basis for innovative medical approaches to diagnosing and delivering light-activated drug therapies for cancer patients. The technology transforms a transparent calcite nanoparticle into a sparkling gold-like particle, turning an “invisible” particle into one that is visible despite […]

Melanoma is a common type of skin cancer – it is pretty much the reason why you have to put sunscreen on every time you leave the house. Melanoma can develop very rapidly, but scientists at the University of Queensland have now found a way to put the brakes on […]

Tasmanian tree skinks, as the name suggests, are lizards native to Tasmania. They live in a huge variety of habitats – from rocky coastlines to actual trees. They eat insects, spiders and sand hoppers, while sometimes enjoying an occasional amphipod. Now scientists at the University of Tasmania found that Tasmanian […]

COVID-19 is a common pandemic disease. In fact, it is likely that you know several people who had it or you had it yourself. After you get better from this infection, your body’s immune system knows how to protect you from COVID-19 for quite some time. But how long does […]

Regular physical activity has positive effects on children's developing brain circuits, finds a Boston Children's Hospital study using neuroimaging data from nearly 6,000 early adolescents. Physical activity of any kind was associated with more efficiently organized, flexible, and robust brain networks, the researchers found. The more physical activity, the more “fit” […]

Salk research shows how to optimize the production of insulin-producing cells from stem cells. Type 1 diabetes, which arises when the pancreas doesn’t create enough insulin to control levels of glucose in the blood, is a disease that currently has no cure and is difficult for most patients to manage. […]

Salk research reveals clues about molecular changes underlying muscle loss tied to aging. One of the many effects of aging is loss of muscle mass, which contributes to disability in older people. To counter this loss, scientists at the Salk Institute are studying ways to accelerate the regeneration of muscle […]

Young infants show strong immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, new research has found. In particular, compared with adults, young infants produce relatively high levels of antibodies and immune cells that can specifically protect against COVID-19. The study led by academics and paediatricians at the University of Bristol and Bristol Royal Hospital […]

Throwing out one’s back is a universal, albeit clichéd, a sign of middle age. What’s less common is 50-year-old men with the fragile bone strength of men in their 80s. Researchers at Michigan Medicine found a subset of middle-aged men with cerebral palsy is up to 5.6 times more likely […]

By making a game out of getting their daily steps, new research points to the possibility that people with diabetes could be nudged toward increasing their physical activity, with changes lasting for a full year. Since many now use apps or other digital means to manage their diabetes, this program […]

It’s often cancer’s spread, not the original tumour, that poses the disease’s most deadly risk. “And yet metastasis is one of the most poorly understood aspects of cancer biology,” says Kamen Simeonov, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In a new study, a team led by Simeonov and School of […]

Researchers detail another gene target that could be the crucial link to curing different cancers.  The scientific world has been delving ever deeper into cancer, scourging for even the tiniest biomolecule that could amp up the cure for the deadly disease. A recent discovery in this regard is the gene […]

Study suggests that turning molecular switch off could be a strategy to treat deadly type of skin cancer. Despite only accounting for about 1 percent of skin cancers, melanoma causes the majority of skin cancer-related deaths. While treatments for this serious disease do exist, these drugs can vary in effectiveness […]

New ways to classify and study spinal cord neurons could inform therapies for illness or injury. Spinal cord nerve cells branching through the body resemble trees with limbs fanning out in every direction. But this image can also be used to tell the story of how these neurons, their jobs […]

Medulloblastoma is a rare but devastating childhood brain cancer. This cancer can spread through the spinal fluid and be deposited elsewhere in the brain or spine. Radiation therapy to the whole brain and spine followed by an extra radiation dose to the back of the brain prevents this spread and […]

UC San Francisco is launching a new initiative to propel the development of living therapeutics – a category of treatments broadly defined as human and microbial living cells that are selected, modified, or engineered to treat or cure disease – and bring them quickly to patients. The Living Therapeutics Initiative (LTI) will […]

In 2014, Dudley Lamming was reading a study out of Australia that looked at how mice responded to dozens of controlled diets when one thing caught his attention: The mice fed the least amount of protein were the healthiest. “That was really interesting because it goes against a lot of health information that people […]

The findings on cellular communication hold promise for early human development, disease progression and aging, as well as organ transplantation and for testing therapeutics. The ability to grow the cells of one species within an organism of a different species offers scientists a powerful tool for research and medicine. It’s […]

Tiny nano-sized robots and vehicles that can navigate through blood vessels to reach the site of a disease could be used to deliver drugs to tumours that are otherwise difficult to treat. Once injected or swallowed, most drugs rely upon the movement of body fluids to find their way around […]

Salk scientists reveal new insights into neurodegenerative disorders and potential for genetic therapies. Neurons lack the ability to replicate their DNA, so they’re constantly working to repair damage to their genome. Now, a new study by Salk scientists finds that these repairs are not random, but instead focus on protecting […]