General

Young women with high body fat have a decreased chance of developing breast cancer before menopause, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and their collaborators. The finding, published online in the journal JAMA Oncology, may help researchers better understand the role obesity plays in breast cancer risk. […]

A small-molecule drug is one of the first to preserve hearing in a mouse model of an inherited form of progressive human deafness, report investigators at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The study, which […]

Gene therapy has gained momentum in the past year, following the federal government’s approval of the first such treatments for inherited retinal diseases and hard-to-treat leukemia. Now, research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown, in mice, that genetic material can be delivered to damaged […]

UCLA-led team created a model to predict effectiveness of potential treatments to help the immune system. A research team led by a UCLA bioengineer has developed a model to predict the extent to which new laboratory-designed antibodies will be able to combat specific human diseases. This is the first time […]

Experiments using parasitic worms in the mouse gut have revealed a surprising new form of wound repair, a finding that could help scientists develop ways to enhance the body’s natural healing abilities. Researchers have long believed that adult stem cells contribute to wound healing in tissues like the gut and […]

Recent leaps in gene editing technology have brought ideas that just a decade ago seemed like science fiction to the cusp of reality. The already famous CRISPR system allows scientists to edit faulty genes by cutting and replacing sections of DNA, but new and improved CRISPR techniques have expanded CRISPR’s […]

Medicine is rapidly approaching a great advance that will augment or replace drugs with human cells for treating a range of intractable conditions, an expert in cell therapy told the Wisconsin Technology Council. Jacques Galipeau, assistant dean for therapeutics discovery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public […]

This migration of cells can lead to metastatic disease, which causes about 90 percent of cancer deaths from solid tumors — masses of cells that grow in organs such as the breast, prostate or colon. Understanding the drivers of metastasis could lead to new treatments aimed at blocking the process […]

Eisai Co., Ltd. and Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ: BIIB) announced positive topline results from the Phase II study with BAN2401, an anti-amyloid beta protofibril antibody, in 856 patients with early Alzheimer's disease. The study achieved statistical significance on key predefined endpoints evaluating efficacy at 18 months on slowing progression in Alzheimer's […]

University of Adelaide research shows that the results of the most widely used test for prostate cancer may be affected by obesity. With increasing prevalence of obesity in high-income countries, this study published by the Society for Endocrinology, has important implications for detecting and monitoring the most common form of cancer […]

A device under development at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University could help bring back lost brain function by measuring how the brain responds to therapies that stimulate it with electric current. The approach could open new avenues for treating brain disorders and selectively switching […]

“By bringing together novel packaging and microelectronic technologies, and in close collaborations with ophthalmologists, we were able to design a miniaturized, fully wireless, and highly-sensitive sensor,” says Azita Emami, Caltech's Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, and paper co-author. […]

Researchers at UW Medicine in Seattle have successfully used human stem cells to restore heart function in monkeys with heart failure. The findings suggest that the technique will be effective in patients with heart failure, the leading cause of death in the world. “The cells form new muscle that integrates […]

Can we use nanotechnology to transform our own immune cells into cancer serial killers? Dr. Carston R. Wagner, professor and endowed chair of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry in the College of Pharmacy and Masonic Cancer Center member, has proven so by his team’s development of techniques that activate immune cells, specifically T-cells, to […]

While out mowing his carefully kept lawn during the summer and fall of 2012, a 75-year-old retiree noticed his lower back and side didn’t feel quite right. But it didn’t seem like the normal muscle tweak and spasms. So, when he went in for his annual physical that fall, he […]

James McNew’s and Michael Stern’s biochemical hunt for the root cause of a rare, paralyzing genetic disorder is a 10-year quest that’s taken an unexpected turn toward everyday killers such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and aging. The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Rice University scientists a five-year R01 grant to […]

Want to be a supercentenarian? The chances of reaching the ripe old age of 110 are within reach – if you survive the perilous 90s and make it to 105 when death rates level out, according to a study of extremely old Italians led by UC Berkeley and Sapienza University […]

University of Nebraska–Lincoln psychologist Maital Neta aims to find out why people interpret ambiguous everyday events — are they whispering about me? — more favorably as they get older. Her research could one day help inform treatment options for depression, anxiety and similar maladies. Neta has earned a $756,611 Faculty Early Career […]

Most cells in the human body have a cilium, a slender cell protuberance that picks up signals from the cell's external environment. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now shown that these fine sensory antennae play a key role in the formation of melanoma. When cilia are prevented from […]

In a new study published online in Nature Medicine, UC San Francisco researchers have identified a key biological pathway in human cancer patients that appears to prime the immune system for a successful response to immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors. The findings, including initial observations from human tumor samples, mechanistic […]

More than 60 percent of breast cancer cases involve defects in the same biochemical chain of events within cancer cells — known as the PI3 kinase (PI3K) pathway — but efforts to develop therapies targeting this pathway have met with little success after hundreds of mostly failed clinical trials. And […]

Xander, while growing up in the perpetual sensory assault of Manhattan, had to get off the train any time someone with a guitar entered his subway car to play for small change. Cal had a more enigmatic reaction to stimuli. His mother, Jennifer, points to the floor-to-ceiling windows in her […]

Canadian researchers have discovered a new and direct molecular mechanism to stop cancer cells from proliferating. In the prestigious journal Nature Cell Biology, scientists from Université de Montréal show that a disruption of a fine balance in the composition of ribosomes (huge molecules that translate the genetic code into proteins) results […]

Emerging CAR-T immunotherapies leverage modified versions of patient’s T-cells to target and kill cancer cells. In a new study, published in Cell Stem Cell, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Minnesota report that similarly modified natural killer (NK) cells derived from human induced pluripotent […]

Many cases of early-stage kidney cancer can be treated with a relatively new, nonsurgical procedure used to destroy tumors, a study by a team led by Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian suggests. The procedure, called percutaneous ablation, involves the insertion of a needle through the skin into a kidney tumor, […]

A tumor’s goal is simple: to grow, grow, grow, by making more cancer cells. But that often means growing so fast that the oxygen supply gets scarce, at which point cells within the tumor start to suffocate. Without oxygen, these ever-dividing cells struggle to make enough aspartate, a crucial ingredient […]

Remove tumor cells from a living organism and place them in a dish, and they will multiply even faster than before. The mystery of why this is has long stumped cancer researchers, though many have simply focused on the mutations and chains of molecular reactions that could prompt such a […]

Men with non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer and a quickly rising PSA level present a medical dilemma. The rising PSA (prostate-specific antigen) means there is cancer activity, but no visible metastasis in a scan. These men are receiving hormone treatments to reduce the testosterone on which their cancer feeds, but their cancers […]

Need to kill tumors? Just add heat. That’s the promise of heated magnetic nanoparticles, a futuristic-sounding technology that could one day be used to fry and eradicate cancer cells without harming healthy tissue elsewhere in the body. New research led by the University at Buffalo advances this concept, with scientists […]

A new Tel Aviv University study explores a novel smart probe for image-guided surgery that may dramatically improve post-surgical outcomes for cancer patients. In many kinds of cancers, it is often not the primary malignant tumor, but rather metastasis — the spread of lingering cancer cells to other parts of the body […]