News by Subject Medicine & Health

Chemistry researchers have patented a method for making anti-leukemia compounds that until now have only been available via an Asian tree that produces them.

Scientists at the University of Surrey and University College London have revealed an innovative in vitro method that can help to develop easy to swallow medicine for children and older people.

CRISPR/Cas enables the targeted deactivation of genes by cutting DNA at pre-determined sites. This is accomplished by providing the Cas enzyme with a genetic zip code. Using an entire library of zip codes, it is then possible to simultaneously probe multiple sites within the genome, for example to determine which genes are essential for cancer cell survival. This could revolutionize drug discovery.

Combining medications that suppress the immune system has been successful in treating young patients with Crohn's disease, but some physicians have been reluctant to use this strategy in older patients because of concerns about safety. Now an Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics study indicates that older patients can be safely and effectively treated with such combined immunosuppression as well.

Patients' voices are ignored all too often in osteoporosis clinical practice guidelines, say researchers, who reviewed 70 English-language guidelines around the world and found less than 40 percent included any mention of patients' beliefs, values or preferences (BVPs).

A novel precision medicine strategy described in Science Advances offers an intriguing ray of hope for triple-negative breast cancer. The proof-of-concept study shows that dually-targeted, antibody-guided nanoparticles, loaded with an existing chemotherapy drug, markedly improved tumor targeting, decreased tumor and metastatic growth and dramatically improved survival in a mouse model -- with no observable side effects.

As part of continued efforts to develop treatments for anxiety and stress-related disorders, researchers have shown that reactivating a negative memory in a human patient and then administering an anesthetic to that person made it harder for them to retrieve the memory 24 hours later. This result has implications for developing therapies for disorders including post-

A simple new technique developed by engineers from the University of California, Riverside that can detect fake drugs from a video taken as the sample undergoes a disturbance. Called 'chronoprinting,' the technology requires only a few relatively inexpensive pieces of equipment and free software to accurately distinguish pure from inferior food and medicines.

UC San Diego School of Medicine research sets the stage for clinicians to potentially one day use levels of a pancreatic cancer patient's PHLPP1 and PKC enzymes as a prognostic, and for researchers to develop new therapeutic drugs that inhibit PHLPP1 and boost PKC as a means to treat the disease.