General

New computational tool decodes biological language of signaling molecules. An interdisciplinary team of biologists and mathematicians at the University of California, Irvine have developed a new tool to help decipher the language cells use to communicate with one another. In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers introduce CellChat, […]

Gliomas are common brain tumors that comprise about one third of all cancers of the nervous system. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers tested a novel combination treatment approach on mice with tumors with characteristics similar to human astrocytomas — a type of slow-growing glioma—and […]

Pressure injuries, also known as bedsores, are often understood as merely painful or uncomfortable side effects of immobility or limited mobility from a spinal cord injury or other causes. But they can also be deadly: At least 60,000 people die from pressure ulcers each year in the United States, according to […]

When a patient arrives in the emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack, doctors’ first priority is to restore blood flow to the heart muscle. Over the past few decades, therapeutic advances aimed at getting blood flowing and reducing strain on the heart have improved patients’ chances of surviving […]

People with cystic fibrosis, or CF, don’t appear to be especially susceptible to COVID-19, and when they do get infected, they don’t seem to get sicker, based on clinical data so far. But Ruobing (Ruby) Wang, an assistant professor of paediatrics at Harvard Medical School who cares for patients with CF […]

Women who have experienced high levels of trauma in childhood, such as abuse by a parent, are biologically older at the epigenetic cellular level in adulthood than women of the same age who have not experienced such adversity, according to a new study by UC San Francisco. Epigenetic “clocks” measure […]

UC San Francisco scientists have formed a research alliance with pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Company aimed at better understanding autoimmune diseases and fostering the development of new therapies. Based on the innovative Immunoprofiler model launched at UCSF in 2015, the new initiative, called AutoImmunoprofiler, inherits the most successful aspects of […]

The brain is involved in everything in our body. When so-called neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS and multiple sclerosis attack the brain, they gradually degrade the human ability to concentrate, speak, remember and move. Despite extensive research, there is much that we still do not know about the brain. […]

Mammals and cold-blooded alligators share a common four-chamber heart structure – unique among reptiles – but that’s where the similarities end. Unlike humans and other mammals, whose hearts can fibrillate under stress, alligators have built-in antiarrhythmic protection. The findings from new research were reported in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology. […]

The relationship between DNA repair pathways and cancer cells can give scientists clues for identifying potential treatments The ongoing fight of science against cancer has made great strides, but cancer cells have not made it easy. The complexity of cancer cells and their adaptive evolutionary nature complicate the search for […]

A radioactive bone cement that’s injected into bone to provide support and local irradiation is proving to be a safer alternative to conventional radiation therapy for bone tumors, according to a study led by University of California, Irvine researchers. The study shows that this brachytherapy cement can be placed into […]

Researchers from Skoltech and their colleagues have demonstrated that nanoengineered biodegradable microcapsules can guide the development of hippocampal neurons in an in vitro experiment. The microcapsules deliver nerve growth factor, a peptide necessary for neuron growth. The paper describing this work was published in the journal Pharmaceutics. Many neurodegenerative conditions […]

Professor Martijn Nawijn, an immunologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells Horizon Magazine about his quest to map every cell in a healthy human lung.  He says this work should help to understand more about the causes of lung disease – which is comparatively understudied – and should lead to new therapies in the next 15 to […]

Scientists reveal that high blood pressure increases lung damage risk in patients with cancer who receive bleomycin chemotherapy. Bleomycin is a drug used to treat certain cancers, such as Hodgkin lymphoma and germ cell tumors. But, bleomycin chemotherapy can cause near-fatal lung damage, a condition called bleomycin-induced lung injury. Now, […]

An international team of scientists has sequenced the genome of a capuchin monkey for the first time, uncovering new genetic clues about the evolution of their long lifespan and large brains. Published in PNAS, the work was led by the University of Calgary in Canada and involved researchers at the University […]

Statistical modeling developed by Oregon State University researchers has confirmed that changes to melanoma patients’ gut microbiome led them to respond to a type of treatment capable of providing long-term benefit. Findings were published in Science. The modeling technique invented by Andrey Morgun of the OSU College of Pharmacy and Natalia […]

A study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School found a way to detect the presence of ovarian cancer in patients using Pap test samples, normally used to detect cervical cancer. Currently, no early warning system exists for ovarian cancer, which in 2021, is estimated to kill […]

Bilingual people can effortlessly switch between languages during everyday interactions. But beyond its usefulness in communication, being bilingual could affect how the brain works and enhance certain abilities. Studies into this could inform techniques for learning languages and other skills. More than half of people in Europe speak more than […]

Astrocytes — star-shaped cells in the brain that are actively involved in brain function — may play an important role in stuttering, a study led by a University of California, Riverside, an expert on stuttering has found. “Our study suggests that treatment with the medication risperidone leads to increased activity […]

Advances in diagnosis and care have yielded significant improvements in childhood cancer survival rates in Europe, but the long-term side-effect burden in young people — driven by the unlicensed use of adult cancer medicines — often means the price of survival is high, scientists say. Prescribing unlicensed drugs or the ‘off-label’ use […]

Many cancer patients might respond better to treatments with the help of a new prognostic indicator based on a distinctive pattern of gene activity within tumor cells, according to a new study of human cancer data and experiments on human cancer cell lines grown in the lab. The new research, […]

Anti-retroviral drugs are a vital tool in the prevention and treatment of HIV. A new study of pregnant women in Tanzania shows that life-long antiviral treatment also seems to prevent viral transmission from mother to baby. The results of the study, which was conducted in part by researchers at Karolinska […]

AI-Mind is a 5-year project funded by Horizon 2020, with the goal of facilitating a paradigm shift in clinical practice of mild cognitive impairment. A team of Aalto University and HUS Helsinki University Hospital researchers are involved in the project. AI-Mind will create intelligent digital tools for screening of brain […]

Hormone therapy commonly is given as a targeted treatment for women whose cancer cells carry receptors for estrogen. But the therapy only works for about half of all patients. Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to reliably predict who will benefit and who will not. Researchers at Washington […]

Our pet dogs could help extend human lives beyond their documented effects on people’s wellbeing. Increasingly, studies are looking at how the domestic dog, Canis familiaris, is key to understanding cognition and processes involved in ageing – something that could improve both animal and human wellbeing. ‘In recent years, the […]

Working on a grant of £1.2 million donated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – a British Research Council that provides government funding to research projects related to the physical sciences – Professor Jonathan Shephard and his team are working on a new laser-based system for the […]

In trials these vaccines have shown to be at least 94% effective at preventing people from falling ill with Covid-19. But how safe is this new technology? We spoke to Michel Goldman, a professor of immunology and founder of the I3h Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in healthcare at the Université […]

What causes the immune system to err in this way is not clear, but a growing body of research is looking at the trillions of microbes that share our bodies, known collectively as the microbiome, for an answer. Studies of twins indicate that lifestyle, or environmental, factors can play a […]

A urine test based on University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center research could have avoided one-third of unnecessary prostate cancer biopsies while failing to detect only a small number of cancers, according to a validation study that included more than 1,500 patients. The findings appear in the issue of the Journal of Urology. […]

Scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered the molecular causes of a congenital form of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), an often-fatal heart disorder. This inherited form of DCM — which affects at least several thousand people in the United States at any one time […]