Research News

Many drugs, especially those made of proteins, cannot be taken orally because they are broken down in the gastrointestinal tract before they can take effect. One example is insulin, which patients with diabetes have to inject daily or even more frequently.

In 2015, EPFL researchers led by Melanie Blokesch published a seminal paper in Science showing that the bacterium responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae, uses a spring-loaded spear to literally stab neighboring bacteria and steal their DNA. They identified the spear mechanism to be the so-called “type VI secretion system” or T6SS, also used for interbacterial competition by many other bacteria.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a method to address failures in a promising anti-cancer drug, bringing together tools from genome engineering, protein engineering and biomaterials science to improve the efficacy, accuracy and longevity of certain cancer therapies. 

To spur innovation to meet the challenges of complex care management for people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) and their families, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, has funded a new effort designed to test care interventions in real-world settings.

To spur innovation to meet the challenges of complex care management for people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) and their families, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, has funded a new effort designed to test care interventions in real-world settings.  Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, will partner with Hebrew Senior Life, a Harvard Medical School Affiliate, Roslindale, Massachusetts, to manage the Imbedded Pragmatic AD/ADRD Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Collaboratory with funding from NIA that is expected to total $53.4 million over five years. IMPACT Collaboratory researchers will team with scientists at other universities with health care and long-term care systems to guide research to develop and test novel ways to care for people with AD/ADRD.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have devised a potential treatment against a common type of leukemia that could have implications for many other types of cancer. The new approach takes aim at a way that cancer cells evade the effects of drugs, a process called adaptive resistance.

Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad have developed a method to produce controlled-release oral tablets for treating fungal infections and kala azar. The tablets were found to release the drug Amphotericin B in a sustained and controlled manner over a period of 10 days.

Although the number of women being diagnosed and dying of ovarian cancer is declining, recurrence, drug resistance and mortality remain high for women with high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma, the most common form of epithelial ovarian cancer. A new study in the journal eLife by University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers links changes in the gene for the protein focal adhesion kinase, or FAK, to the cancer's ability to survive chemotherapy.

The remarkable ability of a small Australian sea snail to produce a colourful purple compound to protect its eggs is proving even more remarkable for its potential in a new anti-cancer pharmaceutical.

An innovative graphene-based film helps shield people from disease-carrying mosquitos, according to a new study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The research, conducted by the Brown University Superfund Research Center, Providence, Rhode Island, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers believe that stuttering — a potentially lifelong and debilitating speech disorder — stems from problems with the circuits in the brain that control speech, but precisely how and where these problems occur is unknown. Using a mouse model of stuttering, scientists report that a loss of cells in the brain called astrocytes are associated with stuttering. The mice had been engineered with a human gene mutation previously linked to stuttering. The study(link is external), which appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insights into the neurological deficits associated with stuttering.