General

Lactating mothers who use e-cigarettes or nicotine replacement therapies may be putting their breastfed babies at risk for skull defects, a new study in animals suggests. Cigarette smoking has already been linked to increased risk for these abnormalities in previous research. This study tested the effects of nicotine alone on […]

New research by academics at the University of Bristol has found evidence that prolonged treatment of synthetic corticosteroid drugs increases adrenal gland inflammation in response to bacterial infection, an effect that in the long-term can damage adrenal function. Synthetic corticosteroid drugs are widely prescribed to treat many inflammatory and autoimmune […]

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the University of North Carolina have mapped out the cell types behind various brain disorders. The findings are published in Nature Genetics and offer a roadmap for the development of new therapies to target neurological and psychiatric disorders. One interesting finding was that cells from […]

A biological marker in infants that appears to predict an autism diagnosis has been identified in a small study led by researchers at the School of Medicine. The study of 33 individuals showed that the biomarker, a hormone called vasopressin, was present at lower levels during infancy in the cerebrospinal fluid of babies […]

Histology images hold great potential as a resource for target and biomarker discovery activities. However, in order to use such complex phenotypic data, it is imperative that robust image analysis tools are developed. Novo Nordisk is seeking an image analysis algorithm for the robust segmentation of histology sections. This is […]

Stanford University chemist Paul Wender and his colleagues are working to improve treatments for cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer’s – and they are betting that a drab, weedy marine invertebrate is the means to achieving that end. They have focused on this seemingly unremarkable organism, called Bugula neritina, because it cooperates with a […]

Researchers have discovered how cancer of the kidneys, or renal cancer, causes inflammation throughout the whole body. Stopping this inflammation might lead to effective treatments for patients whose renal cancer has spread, or metastasized. The American Cancer Society estimates that renal cancer will kill 9,860 men and 4,970 women in 2020. In Japan, […]

A key area of our biology targeted for potential interventions to slow down or even reverse aging are the caps on the ends of chromosomes called telomeres. These protective caps become shorter each time a cell divides and over time lead to the “fraying” of DNA and the eventual death […]

In everyday life, our tissues, for example skin and muscle, are stretched, pulled and compressed without causing damage to the cells or the DNA. A team of researchers led by Sara Wickström from the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence at the […]

Cancer cells not only ravage the body – they also compete with each other. Cornell mathematicians are using game theory to model how this competition could be leveraged, so cancer treatment – which also takes a toll on the patient’s body – might be administered more sparingly, with maximized effect. […]

The COVID-19 pandemic demands action on many fronts, from prevention to testing to treatment. Not content to focus its research efforts on just one, the laboratory of George Church in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is tackling the problem from […]

Physical exercise can act prophylactically for people with metabolic syndrome and protect them against cardiovascular diseases, a new study from the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH, and Karolinska Institutet published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology reports. Even light physical exercise has been shown to have […]

PNNL staff scientist Kristoffer Brandvold will lead a joint team of researchers in the new partnership. The internal clock that tells our bodies when to sleep, wake, and eat each day could be regulated by more than light exposure and caffeine consumption. Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have recently formed a […]

Babies born prematurely who require treatment to prevent blindness from retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) could be treated with a dose of Avastin (bevacizumab) that is a fraction of the dose commonly used for ROP currently. Results from the dose-finding study were published in JAMA Ophthalmology. The study was conducted by […]

Using induced pluripotent stem cells produced from the skin of a patient with a rare, genetic form of insulin-dependent diabetes called Wolfram syndrome, researchers transformed the human stem cells into insulin-producing cells and used the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to correct a genetic defect that had caused the syndrome. They then implanted […]

A team of University of Alberta engineers is refining a new imaging technique that could reduce the number of repeat surgeries patients undergo to remove cancerous tumors. The team, led by Roger Zemp, is using ultraviolet photoacoustic remote sensing microscopy (UV-PARS) to rapidly visualize and analyze tumor tissue while patients are […]

COVID-19 pandemic already caused almost 200 thousand deaths worldwide. And this is assuming the official data from all countries is accurate. This is a huge loss of life, which would be even worse if countries didn’t implement quarantine regiment. But how many years of life have we actually lost? Everyone […]

A genetic change increases the risk of developing schizophrenia and highlights new opportunities for drug treatment say researchers. The collaborative research by a team from Lancaster, Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities was funded by the Medical Research Council. In the human genome, small sections of DNA have been found to be duplicated (copied) […]

A bioengineer at The University of Texas at Arlington is developing an imaging technique and a special electrocardiogram (EKG) for zebrafish to determine why they are able to regenerate their heart tissue after cardiac arrest. The research could provide crucial insights into one of the United States’ most pressing health […]

Biologist Cornelia Dulac has been missing since 2014. Her audiotapes were discovered at a remote cabin in Eastern Finland together with a fully-equipped research laboratory and a year’s supply of food. It is obvious that something had deviated from Dulac’s plans. She had been researching hydra, an immortal freshwater polyp. The authors […]

Clinicians classify frailty in a symptomatic way, looking at factors such as weight loss, weakness, walking speed, and so forth. This is a method of assessment designed for use with elderly people, but researchers here apply it to a study population that includes people in the 40-60 age range. They find that […]

In this open access paper, researchers present evidence to suggest that the mitochondrial dysfunction that accompanies aging may be a meaningful cause of the loss of neurons that contributes age-related hearing loss, in the sense that it increases the incidence of necroptosis, a form of programmed cell death. Present thinking on the progressive deafness of […]

A new study led by the University of Bristol has shown a common eye condition, glaucoma could be successfully treated with a single injection using gene therapy, which would improve treatment options, effectiveness and quality of life for many patients. Glaucoma affects over 64 million people worldwide and is a […]

Can staying up late make you fat? A growing body of research has suggested that poor sleep quality is linked to an increased risk of obesity by deregulating appetite, which in turn leads to more calorie consumption. But a new study published in PLOS Biology found that the direction of this […]

National Eye Institute (NEI) researchers profiling epigenomic changes in light-sensing mouse photoreceptors have a clearer picture of how age-related eye diseases may be linked to age-related changes in the regulation of gene expression. The findings, published online in Cell Reports, suggest that the epigenome could be targeted as a therapeutic […]

From an evolutionary perspective, human pregnancy is quite strange, says University at Buffalo biologist Vincent Lynch. “For example, we don’t know why human women go into labor,” Lynch says. “Human pregnancy tends to last longer than pregnancy in other mammals if you adjust for factors like body size. The actual […]

Experts at the University of Tokyo have identified a new protein in the pathway that leads to Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers used the “molecular scissors” of CRISPR/Cas9 to search for new genes related to neurodegenerative disease. The exact causes of Alzheimer’s disease remain unknown, but one of the most well- supported […]

Viruses are nature's Trojan horses: They gain entrance to cells, smuggle in their genetic material, and use the cell's own machinery to replicate. For decades, scientists have studied how to minimize their deleterious effects and even repurpose these invaders to deliver not their own viral genome, but therapeutics for treating […]

A team of scientists led by the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and Case Comprehensive Cancer Center has identified the binding site where drug compounds could activate a key braking mechanism against the runaway growth of many types of cancer. The discovery marks a critical step toward developing a potential new class of anti-cancer drugs […]

The insides of living cells can be seen in their natural state in greater detail than ever before using a new technique developed by researchers in Japan. This advance should help reveal the complex and fragile biological interactions of medical mysteries, like how stem cells develop or how to deliver […]