Category Health/Medical

A drug already licensed for the treatment of breast and ovarian cancer effects of chemotherapy, can target an Achilles heel in prostate cancers with a weakness in their ability to repair damaged DNA. It is now on the verge of becoming approved as the first genetically targeted treatment for prostate cancer.

This precision medicine drug, a type of treatment called a PARP inhibitor which specifically targets cancer cells with faulty DNA repair genes, blocked prostate cancer growth more effectively than the modern targeted hormone treatments abiraterone and enzalutamide.

The final results from the PROfound trial, published in the journal the New England Journal of Medicine today (Tuesday), are...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of North Carolina in the USA 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 the gut’s nervous system are involved in Parkinson’s disease, indicating that the disease may start there.

The nervous system is composed of hundreds of different cell types with very different functions...

Immunotherapy combo that encourages immune cells to consume tumors could lead to long-term remission for glioblastoma. A combination of immunotherapy agents that encourages some immune cells to eat cancer cells and alert others to attack tumors put mice with a deadly type of brain cancer called glioblastoma into long-term remission, a new study led by UT Southwestern scientists suggests. The finding, published online March 20, 2020, in Nature Communications, could lead to new therapies that may significantly extend survival for human glioblastoma patients, which stands at an average of 15 months after diagnosis even with current state-of-the-art therapies.

The immune system has two branches: innate immunity, an evolutionarily older system that continually scans the b...

Phase 1 trial shows promise for completion of stalled eradication effort; offers lessons for COVID-19 vaccine development. Virologists report promising Phase 1 clinical results for the first new oral polio vaccine in 50 years, which they have designed to be incapable of evolving the ability to cause disease in humans.

Before being halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a relentless vaccination campaign had nearly succeeded in eradicating polio from the world...