Category Biology/Biotechnology

Levodopa, or L-dopa, is considered the most effective treatment for Parkinson’s disease today. After a few years of treatment, however, almost all patients develop a debilitating side-effect called L-dopa induced dyskinesia, or LID, which causes involuntary movements in the limbs, face, and torso. Deep brain stimulation can alleviate LID, but the procedure is highly invasive and not all patients are eligible.

Now, a new study led by researchers at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the CUNY School of Medicine shows that drugs that increased signaling by a protein called ...

The EVONANO platform allows scientists to grow virtual tumors and use artificial intelligence to automatically optimize the design of nanoparticles to treat them.

The ability to grow and treat virtual tumors is an important step towards developing new therapies for cancer. Importantly, scientists can use virtual tumors to optimize design of nanoparticle-based drugs before they are tested in the laboratory or patients.

The paper, “Evolutionary computational platform for the automatic discovery of nanocarriers for cancer treatment,” is published today in the Nature journal Computational Materials. The paper is the result of the European project EVONANO which involves Dr...

Cancer-fighting immune cells in patients with lung cancer whose tumors do not respond to immunotherapies appear to be running on a different “program” that makes them less effective than immune cells in patients whose cancers respond to these immune treatments, suggests a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

The findings, published in the August 5 issue of Nature, could lead to new ways to overcome tumor resistance to these treatments.

“Cancer immunotherapies have tremendous promise, but this promise only comes to fr...

Scientists discover a new enzymatic complex that can stop cells from aging, opening the way to possible new cancer therapies. Researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new multi-enzyme complex that reprograms metabolism and overcomes “cellular senescence,” when aging cells stop dividing.

In their study published today in Molecular Cell, the researchers show that an enzyme complex named HTC (hydride transfer complex) can inhibit cells from aging.

“HTC protects cells from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen that normally leads to their death,” said senior author Gerardo Ferbeyre, an UdeM biochemistry professor and principal scientist at the CRCHUM, the university’s affiliated teaching hospital resea...