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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their collaborators have developed a technique that allows them to speed up or slow down human heart cells growing in a dish on command — simply by shining a light on them and varying its intensity. The cells are […]

Getting old is no fun at all. Not only you are reaching the final stages of your life, but your quality of life degrades dramatically. This, of course, is related to poor physical health, faintness and declining cognitive ability. However, dementia does not affect all people equally. Scientists from UCL […]

QUT researchers have developed a new drug that has the potential to dramatically slow the ageing process and delay, or even prevent, major diseases in humans, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, Type 2 Diabetes and arthritis. The Scientific Director of the Cancer and Ageing Research Program (CARP), Associate Professor Derek Richard from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical […]

Pancreatic cancer is expected to become the second deadliest cancer in the United States by 2030. It is tough to cure because it is usually not discovered until it has reached an advanced stage. But a new diagnostic test developed by researchers at UC San Diego shows promise for detecting […]

Moderate to high intensity exercise does not slow cognitive (mental) impairment in older people with dementia, finds a trial led by a University of Warwick researcher. The study DAPA: Dementia and Physical Activity has been published by The BMJ and was led by Sarah Lamb, Professor of Rehabilitation at Warwick […]

University of Minnesota researchers in the Institute for Molecular Virology (IMV) have made a key discovery that could have important implications for developing a strategy to stop the spread of a highly infectious virus currently spreading among remote areas of central Australia. Called human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1), infection rates […]

This is the first step towards developing a brain-controlled hearing aid. A hearing aid basically enhances all the sounds in our surroundings. This means, for example, that during a restaurant visit, background noise is increased just as much by a hearing aid as the speech from the person sitting opposite. […]

Interfering with the motion of a kinase enzyme might be a new approach for the development of anti-cancer drugs, new UA-led research suggests. Revealing all the steps required to activate an enzyme called a protein kinase may identify new ways to target cancer, according to new University of Arizona-led research. […]

Jean-François Côté, a researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) and professor at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Medicine, studies metastasis, the leading cause of cancer-related death. Recently, his team uncovered a protein that, once deactivated, could prevent the development of metastases in an aggressive type of cancer, HER2-positive […]

In a 10-patient cohort study led by Dr. Jean Roy, hematologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Université de Montréal, that aims to understand how to mitigate the risks associated with the treatment of multiple myeloma, a malignant cancer, researchers have adopted an innovative approach based on the unique immunological […]

Dementia should join the expanding list of possible complications following concussion, even if the patient did not lose consciousness, say researchers from UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care System. In their study, which tracked more than one-third of a million veterans, the likelihood of dementia was […]

The big question As an embryo develops from a little glob of primitive cells, it patterns itself into precise, spatially organized regions and tissues. This requires that individual cells coordinate with one another over long distances by releasing and detecting specialized signaling molecules. How can cells, communicating only in this […]

Mutations in genes that help repair damage to DNA may aid in predicting the prognosis of patients with bladder and other related cancers, according to researchers. The researchers found that bladder cancer patients who had mutations in their ATM or RB1 genes — proteins that help repair DNA damage when […]

Device could help advance regenerative medicine A UCLA bioengineer has developed a technique that uses a specially adapted 3D printer to build therapeutic biomaterials from multiple materials. The advance could be a step toward on-demand printing of complex artificial tissues for use in transplants and other surgeries. “Tissues are wonderfully […]

For years, researchers have known that a gene called EAK-7 plays an important role in determining how long worms will live. But it remained unclear whether the gene had a counterpart in humans and – if it did – how that human version would work. Now, researchers led by UCLA’s […]

A new study identifies a molecule that may be critical to the repair of white matter, the fatty tissue wrapped around parts of brain cells that helps speed up communication. Damage to white matter is associated with several conditions, including multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy, and can occur in the […]

Men who take once-daily aspirin have nearly double the risk of melanoma compared to men who are not exposed to daily aspirin, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. Women, however, do not have an increased risk in this large patient population. “Given the widespread use of aspirin and the potential […]

Personalized therapies are the future, but they do pose a challenge. If every therapy will be different, how do you test them? Obviously, doctors would have the best test subject available – the patient, but you can only do so much with him. Now a team if scientists lead by […]

A team of medical researchers have taken a step in investigating whether a type of RNA found to be linked to cancers — called microRNAs — could one day be used as a more accurate screening test for prostate cancer. The researchers said that out of the 733 microRNAs analyzed […]

A Western-style diet triggers changes in the brain that may predispose patients to Alzheimer’s disease decades before they show any sign of cognitive decline, according to new research by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. In two studies, published in BMJ Open and in Neurology, the investigators showed that diet and insulin […]

Graphene enables structural analysis of naturally occurring amyloids. A new experimental method permits the X-ray analysis of amyloids, a class of large, filamentous biomolecules which are an important hallmark of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. An international team of researchers headed by DESY scientists has used a powerful X-ray […]

Cancer drops sparse chemical hints of its presence early on, but unfortunately, many of them are in a class of biochemicals that could not be detected thoroughly, until now. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a chemical trap that exhaustively catches what are called glycoproteins, including minuscule traces that have previously […]

A major hurdle to using neural stem cells derived from genetically different donors to replace damaged or destroyed tissues, such as in a spinal cord injury, has been the persistent rejection of the introduced material (cells), necessitating the use of complex drugs and techniques to suppress the host’s immune response. […]

A team from the University of Oxford and Cardiff University have used mathematical models to re-enact the complex process of brain development that occurs as initialising cells, otherwise known as progenitor cells, start to grow and begin to differentiate into more specialist cells at various points in time. By applying […]

Osteosarcoma is the most common bone cancer to affect dogs. It is a painful and aggressive disease. Affecting more than 10,000 dogs annually, predominantly larger breeds, it kills more than 85 percent within two years. Nicola Mason, a researcher and veterinarian at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, is working […]

How strong are your hands? What‘s your handshake – firm and strong or maybe sloppy and relaxed? These are just some curious questions, but your grip strength is actually very important in terms of diagnostics. Scientists from the University of Glasgow say that a week grip could be a sign […]

Research by University of Alberta scientists into PD-1, a cell surface receptor that naturally plays a major role in de-escalating the body’s immune system, may explain why it can go haywire and cause autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes. “PD-1 has caused a lot of excitement in recent years as […]

By studying a rare liver disease called Alagille syndrome, scientists from UC San Francisco and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have discovered the mechanism behind an unusual form of tissue regeneration that may someday reduce the need for expensive and difficult-to-obtain organ transplants. The team’s findings, published in Nature, show that […]

UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a promising new line of attack against lethal, treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Analysis of hundreds of human prostate tumors revealed that the most aggressive cancers depend on a built-in cellular stress response to put a brake on their own hot-wired physiology. Experiments in mice and […]

Biochemist Dr Jody Mason has been awarded a prestigious Pioneer Award from Cancer Research UK to work on a new way of screening molecules which could become new cancer medicines. CRUK Pioneer Awards are given to scientists with innovative, higher risk ideas that could revolutionise our understanding of cancer. Dr Mason’s work […]