Virginia Tech researchers at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute have discovered that microscopic structural changes in the aging heart may help prevent irregular heartbeats. The discovery challenges the idea that all age-related heart changes are harmful. 

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has designated allopurinol as the first orphan drug for the treatment of Marfan syndrome, a rare connective tissue disease which as no cure to date. This disease causes an aortic aneurysm (an abnormal dilatation of the aorta) and affects about 7 in 100,000 people in the European Union. Drugs known as orphan drugs are intended to treat such rare conditions that pharmaceutical companies need favourable conditions to market them.

An unprecedented international effort to decode how cells manage the transport of chemical substances has culminated in four groundbreaking studies published in Molecular Systems Biology. Led by Giulio Superti-Furga at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and supported by an international consortium of academic and pharmaceutical partners under the European Union's Innovative Medicines Initiative, this decade-long project provides the first comprehensive functional blueprint of chemical transport pathways in human cells.

Groundbreaking research reveals the potential of stem cell-based therapies combined with biomaterials in effectively treating intrauterine adhesions (IUA) and thin endometrium (TE), two common causes of infertility.

The demand for the widely used cancer drug Taxol is increasing, but it’s difficult and expensive to produce because it hasn’t been possible to do it biosynthetically. Until now, that is. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have cracked the last part of a code that science has struggled with for 30 years. The breakthrough could halve the price of the drug and make production far more sustainable.