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Updated: 21 hours 7 min ago

More than 39 million deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections estimated between now and 2050

Mon, 09/16/2024 - 10:00
More than 39 million people around the world could die from antibiotic-resistant infections over the next 25 years, according to a study published in The Lancet.

The new study by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project is the first global analysis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) trends over time.

It reveals that more than one million people died each year as a result of AMR between 1990 and 2021.

How the immune system fails as cancer arises

Fri, 09/13/2024 - 10:00
Cancer has been described as "a wound that does not heal," implying that the immune system is unable to wipe out invading tumor cells. A new discovery confirms that a key molecule can reprogram immune cells that normally protect against infection and cancer, turning them into bad guys that promote cancer growth.

Studying the behavior of these "pro-tumor" immune cells is important because they could be targets for therapies that block their harmful activity, said Minsoo Kim, PhD, corresponding author of the study and a research leader at the Wilmot Cancer Institute.

Laughter may be as effective as drops for dry eyes

Thu, 09/12/2024 - 10:00
Laughter may be as effective as eye drops in improving symptoms of dry eye disease, finds a clinical trial from China published by The BMJ.

The researchers suggest that laughter exercise could be an initial treatment for relieving symptoms of dry eye disease.

Dry eye disease (DED) is a chronic condition estimated to affect around 360 million individuals worldwide.

Pfizer highlights diverse oncology oortfolio and combination approaches at ESMO 2024

Wed, 09/11/2024 - 10:00
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) continues to showcase potential practice-changing research and next-generation candidates across its robust Oncology portfolio at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2024, being held September 13-17 in Barcelona. Data from more than 50 company-sponsored, investigator-sponsored and collaborative research abstracts, including more than 10 oral and mini-oral presentations, will be presented across the company's tumor areas and core scientific modalities, as well as a potential treatment for a cancer-related condition.

Gene therapy effective in hereditary blindness

Tue, 09/10/2024 - 10:00
Bothnia dystrophy is a form of hereditary blindness, prevalent in the region Västerbotten in Sweden. A new study at Karolinska Institutet published in Nature Communications shows that gene therapy can improve vision in patients with the disease.

Bothnia dystrophy occurs mainly in the region Västerbotten in Sweden, but the disease has also been identified in other parts of the world.

Drugs prescribed off-label may do more harm than good

Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:00
A new study from King's College London shows that off-label prescriptions of a common antidepressant doesn't help breathlessness in patients with respiratory disease - and may cause side effects.

Researchers warn prescribing medicines for a use which it has not been licensed could make things worse, even though the prescriber was trying to help.

A new AI tool for cancer

Fri, 09/06/2024 - 10:00
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have designed a versatile, ChatGPT-like AI model capable of performing an array of diagnostic tasks across multiple forms of cancers.

The new AI system, described Sept. 4 in Nature, goes a step beyond many current AI approaches to cancer diagnosis, the researchers said.

Current AI systems are typically trained to perform specific tasks - such as detecting cancer presence or predicting a tumor's genetic profile - and they tend to work only in a handful of cancer types.

Adding anti-clotting drugs to stroke care ineffective

Thu, 09/05/2024 - 10:00
Stroke patients who survive a blood clot in the brain's blood vessels are prone to developing new blockages during their recovery periods, even if they receive vessel-clearing interventions. In an effort to avoid further clots, doctors at 57 sites around the U.S. tested a possible solution: the addition of anti-coagulant drugs to medicine that dissolves blood clots.

But results from the clinical trial, led by Opeolu Adeoye, MD, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicate two such drugs did not improve outcomes.

Immune cells prevent lung healing after viral infection

Wed, 09/04/2024 - 10:00
Investigators involved in a multicenter study co-led by Cedars-Sinai discovered a pathway by which immune cells prevent the lungs' protective barrier from healing after viral infections like COVID-19. The findings, published in Nature may lead to new therapeutic treatment options.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how viral infections can cause long-lasting effects - a condition called long COVID. Also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, long COVID has left a devastating trail of people who continue to live with long-term debilitation after infection.

Newly discovered antibody protects against all COVID-19 variants

Tue, 09/03/2024 - 10:00
Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses that infect other animals.

As part of a new study on hybrid immunity to the virus, the large, multi-institution research team led by The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient.

New pharmaceutically active substances from billions of newly combined molecules

Mon, 09/02/2024 - 10:00
Nowadays, there's lots of buzz about spectacular new medical treatments such as personalised cancer therapy with modified immune cells or antibodies. Such treatments, however, are very complex and expensive and so find only limited application. Most medical therapies are still based on small chemical compounds that can be produced in large quantities and thus at low cost.

The bottleneck in the development of new molecular therapies is the limited number of new active substances that can be found using current techniques. A method developed in the 2000s at Harvard and ETH Zurich promises to provide a remedy: DNA-encoded chemical libraries (DEL).

Bayer and NextRNA Therapeutics enter strategic collaboration to develop small molecules targeting long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in oncology

Fri, 08/30/2024 - 10:00
Bayer and NextRNA Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on developing transformative medicines to address long non-coding RNA (lncRNA)-driven diseases, have entered into a collaboration and license agreement to develop small molecule therapeutics targeting lncRNAs in oncology. lncRNAs represent a vast class of therapeutic targets that recruit RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) to drive pathological processes across diseases. Disrupting lncRNA-RBP interactions with small molecules represents an innovative approach to develop a new class of therapeutic agents.

Pfizer launches PfizerForAll™, a digital platform that helps simplify access to healthcare

Thu, 08/29/2024 - 10:00
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) introduced PfizerForAll, a user-friendly digital platform designed to make access to healthcare and managing health and wellness more seamless for people across the U.S. The new, end-to-end experience will support the millions of Americans affected annually by common illnesses like migraine, COVID-19 or flu, and those seeking to protect themselves with adult vaccinations. By bringing together critical resources and services into a single destination, PfizerForAll helps individuals and their families cut down on the time and steps needed to take important health actions like getting care, filling prescriptions, and finding potential savings on Pfizer medicines.

A discovery to set your heart a-knocking

Wed, 08/28/2024 - 10:00
In the late 1960s, three Weizmann Institute of Science researchers developed several protein-like molecules, called copolymers, that they believed would produce a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in laboratory animals. The scientists - Prof. Michael Sela, Prof. Ruth Arnon and Dr. Dvora Teitelbaum - were surprised to discover that, instead of causing the disease, the copolymers cured it; one of these molecules became the widely-used drug Copaxone. More than half a century later, in a new study being published in Nature Cardiovascular Research,

Common salt activates anti-tumor cells

Tue, 08/27/2024 - 10:00
Sodium chloride, commonly known as "table salt", was a valuable commodity in history. Today, table salt is cheap and indispensable in the kitchen. It is therefore not surprising that it has long since found its way into our everyday language - although not all expressions always bode well. However, the phrase “rubbing salt into the wound” could soon be given a positive twist, namely in cancer therapy.

In the past, cancer was usually a death sentence, but research has made considerable progress in recent decades and has significantly increased the survival time with a high quality of life for many types of cancer.

Game-changing needle-free COVID-19 intranasal vaccine

Mon, 08/26/2024 - 10:00
A next-generation COVID-19 mucosal vaccine is set to be a gamechanger not only when delivering the vaccine itself, but also for people who are needle-phobic.

New Griffith University research, published in Nature Communications, has been testing the efficacy of delivering a COVID-19 vaccine via the nasal passages.

Professor Suresh Mahalingam from Griffith's Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics has been working on this research for the past four years.