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When someone is sick, it’s natural to want to stay as far from them as possible. It turns out this is also true for mice, according to an MIT study that also identified the brain circuit responsible for this distancing behaviour. In a study that explores how otherwise powerful instincts […]

Bipolar disorder affects millions of Americans, causing dramatic swings in mood and, in some people, additional effects such as memory problems. While bipolar disorder is linked to many genes, each one making small contributions to the disease, scientists don’t know just how those genes ultimately give rise to the disorder’s […]

Thousands of different bacterial species live within the human gut. Most are beneficial, while others can be harmful. A new study from an MIT-led team has revealed that these bacterial populations can remake themselves within the lifetime of their host, bypassing genes back and forth. The researchers also showed that […]

In a clinical trial, early treatment with anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) injections slowed diabetic retinopathy, a complication of diabetes that causes damage to the blood vessels of the light-sensitive tissue in the retina. However, two years into the four-year study, the early treatment’s effect on vision – including changes […]

An aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma has no cure. Patients survive an average of 15 months after diagnosis, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving longer than five years. While researchers are investigating potential new therapies via ongoing clinical trials, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis […]

New research from the lab of Marija Drndić showcases a potential new platform for parallel DNA sequencing. Published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, the study uses state-of-the-art fabrication and analytical techniques and demonstrates a path to how solid-state materials can be further developed for high-throughput sequencing. The research was conducted by Drndić, PhD […]

Children and young adults who receive CAR T-cell therapy for the most common childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, suffer remarkably fewer relapses and are far more likely to survive when the treatment is paired with a subsequent stem cell transplant, a new study finds. The research, with an average, follow […]

Difficulty remembering a password or where a car is parked outside a store doesn’t necessarily suggest memory problems. It’s likely that interference is clouding the brain, suggests University of Oregon neuroscientist Brice Kuhl. How do people encode new information and accurately recall it later? That’s the focus of the Kuhl […]

Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids. Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function. However, less is known about how […]

In 2014, two years after her Nobel Prize-winning invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Jennifer Doudna thought the technology was mature enough to tackle a cure for a devastating hereditary disorder, sickle cell disease, that afflicts millions of people around the world, most of them of African descent. Some 100,000 Black […]

A year ago, when the COVID-19 lockdown began, Dr. Rachel Issaka expected that colonoscopies would decline. She was surprised by how much. In the first two months, in-clinic colon cancer screenings fell by 90%.  “I was shocked,” said Issaka, a UW Medicine gastroenterologist and researcher with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. There […]

When cancer invades the brain, normal salt levels are quickly thrown off-kilter, but detecting this change in patients has been difficult. A team of Yale researchers has developed a non-invasive way to observe these changes in close detail at the early stages of cancer growth. This method, developed in the […]

Earlier studies have shown that supplementary vitamin D seems to provide a certain degree of protection against respiratory infections. A new study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet has now made the most comprehensive synthesis to date of this connection. The study, which is published in the journal Lancet Diabetes & […]

When variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) emerged in late 2020, concern arose that they might elude protective immune responses generated by prior infection or vaccination, potentially making re-infection more likely or vaccination less effective. To investigate this possibility, researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious […]

A new study shows that in the time after first trying cannabis or first misusing prescription drugs, the percentages of young people who develop the corresponding substance use disorder are higher among adolescents (ages 12-17) than young adults (ages 18-25). In addition, 30% of young adults develop a heroin use […]

In a landmark study, a team led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has discovered—and filmed—the molecular details of how a cell, just before it divides in two, shuffles important internal components called mitochondria to distribute them evenly to its two daughter cells. […]

Gustavo Aguirre and William Beltran, veterinary ophthalmologists and vision scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, have studied a wide range of different retinal blinding disorders. But the one caused by mutations in the NPHP5 gene, leading to a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), is one of the most severe. […]

Scientists at UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley and UCLA have received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to jointly launch an early phase, first-in-human clinical trial of a CRISPR gene correction therapy in patients with sickle cell disease using the patient’s own blood-forming stem cells. The trial will combine CRISPR […]

As the ability of medicine to diagnose diseases expands, so does the need for science to decipher their causes. To that end, a team of neuroscientists at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, affiliated with Université de Montréal, has launched a new project called NeuroBasis. It’s an $8M, a multi-institution collaboration […]

Researchers led by the University of Missouri create a new method for analyzing large amounts of biological data to help scientists draw faster conclusions for possible treatments. Studying genetic material on a cellular level, such as single-cell RNA-sequencing, can provide scientists with a detailed, high-resolution view of biological processes at […]

Many people with early-stage or first-episode bipolar disorder have cognitive deficits, such as issues with visual processing and spatial memory, but those deficits are often so subtle that the disorder can go undiagnosed for years. That could change thanks to researchers at the University of Alberta who have created a […]

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have produced a detailed molecular atlas of lung development, which is expected to be a fundamental reference in future studies of mammalian biology and of new treatments for diseases, such as COVID-19, that affect the lungs. The researchers, […]

But up to half of older patients undergoing surgery face a lesser-known but similarly formidable cognitive challenge: postoperative delirium, a condition triggered by a surgery that requires anaesthesia and whose trademarks are confusion, disturbed mental faculties, loss of orientation and anxiety. In the worst cases, postoperative delirium leads to extended […]

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, […]