General

James McNew’s and Michael Stern’s biochemical hunt for the root cause of a rare, paralyzing genetic disorder is a 10-year quest that’s taken an unexpected turn toward everyday killers such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and aging. The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Rice University scientists a five-year R01 grant to […]

Want to be a supercentenarian? The chances of reaching the ripe old age of 110 are within reach – if you survive the perilous 90s and make it to 105 when death rates level out, according to a study of extremely old Italians led by UC Berkeley and Sapienza University […]

University of Nebraska–Lincoln psychologist Maital Neta aims to find out why people interpret ambiguous everyday events — are they whispering about me? — more favorably as they get older. Her research could one day help inform treatment options for depression, anxiety and similar maladies. Neta has earned a $756,611 Faculty Early Career […]

Most cells in the human body have a cilium, a slender cell protuberance that picks up signals from the cell's external environment. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now shown that these fine sensory antennae play a key role in the formation of melanoma. When cilia are prevented from […]

In a new study published online in Nature Medicine, UC San Francisco researchers have identified a key biological pathway in human cancer patients that appears to prime the immune system for a successful response to immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors. The findings, including initial observations from human tumor samples, mechanistic […]

More than 60 percent of breast cancer cases involve defects in the same biochemical chain of events within cancer cells — known as the PI3 kinase (PI3K) pathway — but efforts to develop therapies targeting this pathway have met with little success after hundreds of mostly failed clinical trials. And […]

Xander, while growing up in the perpetual sensory assault of Manhattan, had to get off the train any time someone with a guitar entered his subway car to play for small change. Cal had a more enigmatic reaction to stimuli. His mother, Jennifer, points to the floor-to-ceiling windows in her […]

Canadian researchers have discovered a new and direct molecular mechanism to stop cancer cells from proliferating. In the prestigious journal Nature Cell Biology, scientists from Université de Montréal show that a disruption of a fine balance in the composition of ribosomes (huge molecules that translate the genetic code into proteins) results […]

Emerging CAR-T immunotherapies leverage modified versions of patient’s T-cells to target and kill cancer cells. In a new study, published in Cell Stem Cell, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Minnesota report that similarly modified natural killer (NK) cells derived from human induced pluripotent […]

Many cases of early-stage kidney cancer can be treated with a relatively new, nonsurgical procedure used to destroy tumors, a study by a team led by Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian suggests. The procedure, called percutaneous ablation, involves the insertion of a needle through the skin into a kidney tumor, […]

A tumor’s goal is simple: to grow, grow, grow, by making more cancer cells. But that often means growing so fast that the oxygen supply gets scarce, at which point cells within the tumor start to suffocate. Without oxygen, these ever-dividing cells struggle to make enough aspartate, a crucial ingredient […]

Remove tumor cells from a living organism and place them in a dish, and they will multiply even faster than before. The mystery of why this is has long stumped cancer researchers, though many have simply focused on the mutations and chains of molecular reactions that could prompt such a […]

Men with non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer and a quickly rising PSA level present a medical dilemma. The rising PSA (prostate-specific antigen) means there is cancer activity, but no visible metastasis in a scan. These men are receiving hormone treatments to reduce the testosterone on which their cancer feeds, but their cancers […]

Need to kill tumors? Just add heat. That’s the promise of heated magnetic nanoparticles, a futuristic-sounding technology that could one day be used to fry and eradicate cancer cells without harming healthy tissue elsewhere in the body. New research led by the University at Buffalo advances this concept, with scientists […]

A new Tel Aviv University study explores a novel smart probe for image-guided surgery that may dramatically improve post-surgical outcomes for cancer patients. In many kinds of cancers, it is often not the primary malignant tumor, but rather metastasis — the spread of lingering cancer cells to other parts of the body […]

People with a slow developing type of blood cancer may be able to safely come off  ‘life-long’ daily treatment in the future and remain free from cancer, the latest results from a University of Liverpool clinical trial suggest. Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) is diagnosed in around 600 people each year […]

University of Queensland researchers have discovered how to reverse drug resistance in skin and mouth squamous cell carcinomas. UQ Diamantina Institute Associate Professor Nicholas Saunders said squamous cell carcinomas was curable when diagnosed early but difficult to eradicate once the cancer spread. “This cancer of the skin and mouth kills approximately 1,400 […]

In a study published in Stem Cell Reports, a McGill University team of scientists led by Dr. Carl Ernst, researcher at the Douglas Hospital Research Centre, revealed a molecular mechanism that may play a role in the development of autism. By taking skin cells from patients and reprogramming those cells to become […]

A Virginia Tech research team has discovered insights into the stabilizing forces of amyloid fibrils that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes. These findings were recently published in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Amyloids are aggregates of proteins that form a shape that allows many copies of that protein […]

A major study has found that medicines used to treat diabetes in adults are not effective on youth. Researchers say the finding is disturbing because type 2 diabetes among youth is a growing problem. In youth with impaired glucose tolerance or recent-onset type 2 diabetes, neither initial treatment with long-acting insulin followed by the drug […]

Immune cells commonly blamed in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are actually precision cleaning machines protecting the central nervous system, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine shows. The discovery adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of immune cells known as microglia. By appreciating the role of these cells in full, […]

A first-ever tissue implant to safely treat a common jaw defect, known as temporomandibular joint dysfunction, has been successfully tested by UCI-led researchers in animals. “We were able to show that we could achieve exceptional healing of the TMJ area after eight weeks of treatment,” said UCI Distinguished Professor of […]

A new microscope system can image living tissue in real time and in molecular detail, without any chemicals or dyes, report researchers at the University of Illinois. The system uses precisely tailored pulses of light to simultaneously image with multiple wavelengths. This enables the researchers to study concurrent processes within […]

Poor protein in a mother’s diet in early pregnancy, around the time of conception, can have a lasting effect on brain development, according to research recently published by University of Southampton academics. The project, led by Dr Sandrine Willaime-Morawek, in collaboration with Professor Tom Fleming, is the first to clearly […]

From the spatter analysis made famous in the TV show Dexter to the frequent DNA profiling of CSI and the real cases covered in the FBI Files, blood tests are ubiquitous in forensic science. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Sciencethat a new blood test, which could be performed at a crime scene, could help determine […]

Discovery could be a step toward developing treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. UCLA researchers have developed synthetic T lymphocytes, or T cells, that are near-perfect facsimiles of human T cells. The ability to create the artificial cells could be a key step toward more effective drugs to treat cancer […]

Analysis of large data sets from post-mortem brain samples of people with and without Alzheimer’s disease has revealed new evidence that viral species, particularly herpesviruses, may have a role in Alzheimer’s disease biology. Researchers funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, made […]

Scientists seeking to unlock the secrets of cellular aging have identified a gene that triggers senescence, a phenomenon in which cells stop dividing. Senescence is a natural occurrence in the life of a cell, and researchers have sought to learn about it for a couple of reasons. First, it’s connected […]

The disappearance of an entire brain region should be cause for concern. Yet, for decades scientists have calmly maintained that one brain area, the subplate, simply vanishes during the course of human development. Recently, however, research has revealed genetic similarities between cells in the subplate and neurons implicated in autism—leading a […]

A so-called “jumping gene” that researchers long considered either genetic junk or a pernicious parasite is actually a critical regulator of the first stages of embryonic development, according to a new study in mice led by UC San Francisco scientists and published in Cell. Only about 1 percent of the human […]