Public interest in weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic is surging, but national data on dispensing patterns in the United States are surprisingly scarce.

Now, a national study from Michigan Medicine shows that the use of these weight loss drugs is increasing rapidly in adolescents and young adults 12-25 years, especially females.

Regular use of fish oil supplements might increase, rather than lessen, the risk of first time heart disease and stroke among those in good cardiovascular health, but may slow progression of existing poor cardiovascular health and lower the risk of death, suggest the results of a large long term study, published in the open access journal BMJ Medicine.

Fish oil is a rich source of omega 3 fatty acids, and as such, is recommended as a dietary preventive to ward off the development of cardiovascular disease.

Scientists have used breast cancer cells' weakness against themselves by linking a tumour-selective antibody with a cell-killing drug to destroy hard-to-treat tumours.

The research, published today in Clinical Cancer Research by a team from King's College London and funded by Breast Cancer Now, marks a new method in cancer treatment.

Today AstraZeneca revealed its bold ambition to deliver $80 billion in Total Revenue by 2030, up from $45.8 billion in 2023. This will be achieved through significant growth in its existing oncology, biopharmaceuticals and rare disease portfolio, and by launching an expected 20 new medicines before the end of the decade. To drive sustained growth beyond 2030, the Company will continue investing in transformative new technologies and platforms that will shape the future of medicine.

A team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, used a new drug to save the life of a patient with immune thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (iTTP), a rare disorder characterized by uncontrolled clotting throughout the small blood vessels. The group describes the first clinical use of the drug for iTTP in the New England Journal of Medicine.

HIV has proven a hard target for vaccine design. The most promising approach, germline-targeting (GT), proposes a series of immunizations: a first shot to activate inexperienced B cells - antibody-producing white blood cells - followed by a sequence of immunogens that are more and more like the HIV Envelope (Env) protein. The ultimate goal of GT immunization is to coach B cells into producing broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) capable of binding to conserved sites on HIV Env, which seldom change despite HIV's penchant for rapid diversification.

"I consider the drugs available on the marked today as the first generation of weight-loss drugs. Now we have developed a new type of weight-loss drug that affects the plasticity of the brain and appears to be highly effective."

So says Associate Professor and Group Leader Christoffer Clemmensen, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, who is senior author of the new study, which has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme in England has not only been associated with a substantial reduction in cervical disease, but has done so in all socioeconomic groups, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

Although women living in the most deprived areas are still at higher risk of cervical disease than those in less deprived areas, the results show that well planned and executed public health interventions can both improve health and reduce health inequalities.

Deaths from cancer or infections can occur when available treatments are ineffective. Once turned on, pregnane X receptor (PXR) activates the expression of genes encoding enzymes that metabolize external chemicals, including drugs. This causes a significant drop in the effectiveness of chemotherapy, antivirals and other pharmaceuticals. Blocking the PXR activity is notoriously difficult, as many drugs that bind the protein, whether intentionally or unintentionally, activate it. Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have leveraged chemical and structural studies in the design of PXR inhibitors to better understand this process.

Researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center have found in pre-clinical studies that an experimental gene therapy for genital and oral herpes removed 90% or more of the infection and suppressed how much virus can be released from an infected individual, which suggests that the therapy would also reduce the spread of the virus.

"Herpes is very sneaky. It hides out among nerve cells and then reawakens and causes painful skin blisters," said Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch.

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough that offers promise for developing new immune therapies for cancer. They have discovered that a vaccine adjuvant - or "booster" - called C100 promotes potent anti-tumour immunity when it is injected directly into tumours in an animal model.

The scientists found that C100, derived from chitin - one of the most common building materials in nature, and which gives strength to the exoskeletons of crustaceans, insects, and the cell walls of fungi - is highly effective at stimulating a key sensing and signalling molecule which regulates anti-tumour immune responses.

Researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School have developed a potential new treatment for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss and affects people of all ages, including children.

For most patients with this type of hair loss, there is no effective treatment. The team developed a microneedle patch that can be painlessly applied to the scalp and releases drugs that help to rebalance the immune response at the site, halting the autoimmune attack.

Using artificial intelligence, Ludwig Cancer Research scientists have developed a powerful predictive model for identifying the most potent cancer killing immune cells for use in cancer immunotherapies.

Combined with additional algorithms, the predictive model, described in the current issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, can be applied to personalized cancer treatments that tailor therapy to the unique cellular makeup of each patient's tumors.

Novartis announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Mariana Oncology, a preclinical-stage biotechnology company based in Watertown, Massachusetts focused on developing novel radioligand therapies (RLTs) to treat cancers with high unmet patient need.

The transaction bolsters the Novartis RLT pipeline and expands the company's research infrastructure and clinical supply capabilities, supporting Novartis strategic priorities in oncology and RLT platform innovation.

About 79% of clinical trial participants experienced measurable improvement after receiving experimental, CRISPR-based gene editing that is designed to fix a rare form of blindness, according to a paper published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"This trial shows CRISPR gene editing has exciting potential to treat inherited retinal degeneration," said Mark Pennesi, M.D., Ph.D., a corresponding author on the paper, an ophthalmologist and Oregon Health & Science University's lead scientist for the Phase 1/2 BRILLIANCE trial.

Neuroblastoma is a common pediatric cancer that originates in developing nerve cells outside the brain. While increasingly intensive treatments have improved the survival of patients with high-risk neuroblastoma, currently more than 40% of patients do not survive.

New research from the University of Chicago shows the potential for a promising new approach to treating neuroblastoma by targeting RNA modifications associated with the disease.

Working with human breast and lung cells, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have charted a molecular pathway that can lure cells down a hazardous path of duplicating their genome too many times, a hallmark of cancer cells.

The findings, published May 3 in Science, reveal what goes wrong when a group of molecules and enzymes trigger and regulate what's known as the "cell cycle," the repetitive process of making new cells out of the cells' genetic material.

Many bacteria produce substances to gain an advantage over competitors in their highly competitive natural environment. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered a new so-called lantibiotic, namely epilancin A37. It is produced by staphylococci that colonize the skin and acts specifically against their main competitors there, the corynebacteria.

Researchers at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, after decades of research efforts, have developed a mouse model of Kaposi sarcoma that could be key to the development of new drugs to treat the disease. Kaposi sarcoma is a cancer that is the most common cancer in people living with HIV.

The findings appeared in Cell Host & Microbe.

A healthy lifestyle may offset the effects of life-shortening genes by more than 60%, suggests an analysis of the findings from several large long term studies, published online in the journal BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.

While genes and lifestyle seem to have an additive effect on a person's lifespan, an unhealthy lifestyle is independently linked to a 78% heightened risk of dying before one’s time, regardless of genetic predisposition, the research indicates.