General

Millions of people worldwide are living with chronic spinal cord injuries, with 250,000 to 500,000 new cases each year—most from vehicle crashes or falls. The most severe spinal cord injuries completely paralyze their victims and more than half impair a person’s ability to breathe. Now, a breakthrough study published in Nature […]

After learning their son Andrew had a serious peanut allergy, Jennifer and Daniel Ayala did everything they could to protect him, from becoming master label readers to sending him to birthday parties with his own treats. Still, there were times Andrew accidentally ingested peanut, most often from an outside food […]

A change in the genome of Caucasians could explain much higher rates of the most common type of esophageal cancer in this population, a new study finds. It suggests a possible target for prevention strategies, which preliminary work suggests could involve flavonoids derived from cranberries. Flavonoids are a class of […]

Findings from a new study by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) show that patients treated with chemotherapy for most solid tumors during 2000–2014 experienced an increased risk of therapy-related myelodysplastic syndrome/acute myeloid leukemia (tMDS/AML). The study, which used U.S. population-based cancer registry data from NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and […]

MIT chemical engineers and neuroscientists have devised a new way to preserve biological tissue, allowing them to visualize proteins, DNA, and other molecules within cells, and to map the connections between neurons. The researchers showed that they could use this method, known as SHIELD, to trace the connections between neurons […]

In 2015, then-President Barack Obama launched a precision medicine initiative, saying that its promise was “delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time to the right person.” A biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has answered the call by making a significant step toward precision medicine […]

The technology for an eye specialist to review a picture of a patient’s eye taken miles away to screen for eye disease has been around for decades. Yet, less than half of Wisconsin adults with diabetes, who are particularly vulnerable to vision-threatening diseases, get annual eye screenings. Dr. Yao Liu, […]

Doctors may be able to assess the survival rates of melanoma patients following the discovery of a molecule that allows the cancer to spread from the skin to other parts of the body. University of Queensland researchers hope that targeting this molecule may offer a way to stop the cancer from […]

There is growing evidence that lithium could be re-purposed as an anti-aging drug, and a new study from King’s College London suggests that lithium’s protective effects are due to a slowing down of the molecular aging process in cells. The research, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, also finds some individuals may benefit from […]

Could a change in diet be beneficial to people with autoimmune diseases such as lupus? A Yale-led team of researchers have revealed how a dietary intervention can help prevent the development of this autoimmune disease in susceptible mice. The study was published in Cell Host & Microbe. For the study, led […]

Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing […]

From birth, it takes humans almost two decades to reach adulthood; for a fruit fly, it takes only about 10 days. During a fly embryo's initial stages of development, the insect looks different from minute to minute, and its body plan is defined in just a few hours. Caltech researchers […]