General

A couple of years ago, Joseph Shrager, MD, professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford School of Medicine, noticed a statistical anomaly in his practice. It seemed that patients were diagnosed with lung cancer at a surprisingly higher rate at 65 years old than, say, at 64 or 66. “There were no reason […]

A new analysis of the entire genetic makeup of more than 53,000 people offers a bonanza of valuable insights into heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders, paving the way for new and better ways to treat and prevent some of the most common causes of disability and death. The analysis […]

A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has uncovered a long-sought link in the battle to control cholesterol and heart disease. The protein that interferes with low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that clear “bad” cholesterol from the blood was identified in findings recently published in Nature Communications by Dawei Zhang, associate professor of pediatrics […]

Over evolutionary time scales, a single gene may acquire different roles in diverging species. However, revealing the multiple hidden roles of a gene was not possible before genome editing came along. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists Zach Lippman and Anat Hendelman collaborated with Idan Efroni of Hebrew University in Israel to reveal […]

COVID-19 vaccine is what will pull us out of this pandemic. However, some people are not sure about the timing. If you are waiting for an elective surgery, should you get a vaccine shot before the procedure? Or should you wait and get the jab after the surgery? Scientists at […]

Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) increases intracranial pressure around the brain and causes blindness. Scientists are not sure what causes IIH, because the pressure builds up without the presence of tumour or disease. As the mechanism is unknown treatment for IIH is not yet developed. But now researchers at the University […]

Cocoa is delicious, warming and cosy, but it can also be healthy. Scientists at the University of Birmingham found that drinking cocoa can actually benefit you, despite its desert-like character. Researchers found that consumption of cocoa could protect people from mental stress-induced cardiovascular events – it might be life saving. […]

Triple-negative breast cancer cells engage in a “glutamine steal” — outcompeting T cells for the nutrient glutamine and impairing their ability to kill tumor cells, Vanderbilt researchers have discovered. The team found that an inhibitor of glutamine transport selectively targeted tumor cells and enhanced the antitumor immune response, suggesting it […]

While deadly, gliosarcomas are a rare central nervous system tumor often overshadowed in research by more common tumors. These sarcomas can occur either in the brain or the spine (the latter is much less common). A team of Yale researchers saw an opportunity to expand on the limited knowledge available […]

Tooth pain has been notoriously difficult to study. But now, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital report in a study published in Science Advances that they have uncovered a new function for odontoblasts. These cells form dentin, the shell beneath the tooth’s enamel that encases the soft dental […]

Cancer starts with mutations in a cell’s DNA, but new UC San Francisco research shows that the endurance of a tumour relies on its ability to rapidly evolve and adapt to challenges brought about by the environment in which it grows. “A major obstacle cancer cells must overcome is their […]

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 […]