General

Our ears are exquisite detection instruments, capable of discerning a whisper or distinct notes of music within a symphony. To pick up these sounds, tiny hair-like filaments in the inner ear must be packed into precisely arranged bundles, all facing the same direction. Images of the normal, tidy architecture of […]

For years, Kathi Sigona felt like she had “a chest full of writhing worms in a bag.” The 57-year-old middle school principal also tired easily, but multiple visits to the doctor had found no heart trouble. Then, 12 years ago, Sigona was at her doctor’s office in Modesto, Calif., for […]

Prostate cancer survivors make up the largest group, 41 percent, of male cancer survivors. In these survivors, early detection of recurrence can lead to life-saving interventions, but in older men who survived low-risk cancer and have limited life expectancy, those same interventions may do more harm than good. However, when UC San […]

A new UC San Francisco study has shown that a cancer-killing (“oncolytic”) virus currently in clinical trials may function as a cancer vaccine – in addition to killing some cancer cells directly, the virus alerts the immune system to the presence of a tumor, triggering a powerful, widespread immune response […]

Treatment with an investigational androgen receptor inhibitor significantly delayed the development of metastasis in patients with prostate cancer that had become resistant to standard androgen-deprivation therapy. The results of a multi-institutional, phase 3 clinical trial of apalutamide – led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and University of California […]

New imaging tool for recording changes over time, space and function Researchers who work with stem cells have ambitious goals. Some want to cure cancer or treat heart disease. Others want to grow the tissues and organs that patients need for transplants. Some groups are even working to develop highly […]

Future cancer drugs that are activated by light and don’t cause the toxic side-effects of current chemotherapy treatments are closer to becoming a reality, thanks to new research made possible by the Monash Warwick Alliance, an intercontinental collaboration between the University of Warwick (UK) and Monash University (Australia). Led by […]

Research has shown that older persons who have acquired positive beliefs about old age from their surrounding culture are less likely to develop dementia. This protective effect was found for all participants, as well as among those carrying a gene that puts them at higher risk of developing dementia, a […]

A Yale-led research team has developed an antibody that blocks tumors in animal models of colorectal cancer. If the finding is confirmed in clinical trials, the antibody-based treatment could become an effective weapon against colorectal cancer, and possibly other cancers, that resist current immunotherapies, the researchers said. The study was published […]

A research team led by a biochemist at the University of California, Riverside has solved the crystal structure for an enzyme that plays a key role in DNA methylation, the process by which methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule. DNA methylation alters gene expression. This fundamental cellular mechanism […]

“Our results are exciting and open the way for a medical treatment of this serious vascular disease,” says Professor Jesper Z. Haeggström at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics. An aortic aneurysm occurs when the wall of the body’s largest artery, the aorta, weakens and swells. The disease progresses slowly and […]

But this insidious killer has an Achilles’ heel. Many leukemia cells are betrayed by a molecule on their exterior surfaces known as CD19. When activated, CD19 will kill the cancer cell to which it is attached. To cancer biochemists, CD19 is like a tiny radio signal broadcasting to the world, […]

The study, funded by the charity Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, suggests that the new technique could potentially become a promising new treatment for patients with the aggressive disease, and could be combined with existing chemotherapy to improve chances of survival. Dr Stella Man, from BCI, said: “We’ve shown for the […]

Injecting minute amounts of two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors in mice can eliminate all traces of cancer in the animals, including distant, untreated metastases, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The approach works for many different types of cancers, including those that […]

Investigators in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care have launched a pilot study to see if patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) can tolerate the addition of a commonly used antiviral drug to standard IPF treatments. The research team believes the drug may ultimately help slow progression of […]

High exposure to radiofrequency radiation (RFR) in rodents resulted in tumors in tissues surrounding nerves in the hearts of male rats, but not female rats or any mice, according to draft studies from the National Toxicology Program (NTP). The exposure levels used in the studies were equal to and higher […]

Scientists from the University of Zurich have succeeded for the first time in tracking individual stem cells and their neuronal progeny over months within the intact adult brain. This study sheds light on how new neurons are produced throughout life. The generation of new nerve cells was once thought to […]

Wilmot Cancer Institute patients with advanced melanoma (stage III) now have more options for treatment, thanks to research co-authored by a University of Rochester Medical Center surgical oncologist and published in Lancet Oncology. The study involved comparing two treatment approaches for high-risk melanoma patients with a BRAF gene mutation in their cancer: standard […]

With their large buck teeth and wrinkled, hairless bodies, naked mole rats won’t be winning any awards for cutest rodent. But their long life span—they can live up to 30 years, the longest of any rodent—and remarkable resistance to age-related diseases, offer scientists key clues to the mysteries of aging […]

As part of a breast-cancer diagnosis, doctors analyze the tumor to determine which therapies might best attack the malignancy. But for patients whose cancer is triple-negative — that is, lacking receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2 — the options for treatment dwindle. Triple-negative cancers, or TNBC, also tend to be […]

Precisely timed electrical stimulation to the left side of the brain can reliably and significantly enhance learning and memory performance by as much as 15 percent, according to a study by a team of University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists published  in Nature Communications. It is the first time such a connection has been made […]

Between the ages of two and four, the human brain has an estimated one quadrillion synapses – the electrical connections between neurons. As we age, pruning out extraneous synapses enables existing ones to run more efficiently and is just as important as forming new cellular connections. An imbalance between synapse […]

It’s a fact of life, for lifeforms big and small, that the mind declines with age. Now researchers at UC San Francisco have identified the buildup of one brain chemical as a key culprit behind age-related learning and memory impairments. Tuning levels of this chemical in the worm C. elegans, they […]

It used to be that everyone knew that you are born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. Then UC San Francisco’s Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, PhD, and other neuroscientists discovered in birds and mice that stem cells in certain parts of the brain do produce new neurons throughout the animal’s life. […]

Experts from the University of Exeter and University College London(UCL) have developed a cognitive test to detect subtle memory deficits years before Alzheimer's disease symptoms develop, set out in a paper published in The Lancet Neurology. The study involved 21 people who carry the mutation for early onset Alzheimer's disease who have not shown any […]

For more than 35 years, scientists have tried to isolate embryonic stem cells in cows without much success. Under the right conditions, embryonic stem cells can grow indefinitely and make any other cell type or tissue, which has huge implications for creating genetically superior cows. In a study published in […]

MIT neuroscientists have uncovered a cellular pathway that allows specific synapses to become stronger during memory formation. The findings provide the first glimpse of the molecular mechanism by which long-term memories are encoded in a region of the hippocampus called CA3. The researchers found that a protein called Npas4, previously […]

As a basic unit of life, the cell is one of the most carefully studied components of all living organisms. Yet details on basic processes such as how cells are shaped have remained a mystery. Working at the intersection of biology and physics, scientists at the University of California San […]

One of the many ways science is going to find new solutions is biomimetics – also called bionik – where you try to imitate or restore nature's amazing properties all the way down to the molecular level. On the nanotechnical scale, researchers are working to produce artificial body cells and […]

“Hairy” nanoparticles made with light-sensitive materials that assemble themselves could one day become “nano-carriers” providing doctors a new way to simultaneously introduce both therapeutic drugs and cancer-fighting heat into tumors. That’s one potential application for a new technology that combines water-repelling yet light-sensitive and water-absorbing materials into polymeric nano-reactors for […]