Research News

Dr. Manel Esteller and Dr. Verónica Dávalos, researchers at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, describe in a new article the impact of epigenetics on cancer treatment and how it has become a crucial tool to improve early detection, predict disease progression and become a target for new treatments.

New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine speaks to the benefits of a COVID-19 booster.

The new findings shed light on how mRNA boosters – both Pfizer and Moderna – affect the durability of our antibodies to COVID-19. A booster, the researchers report, made for longer-lasting antibodies for all recipients, even those who have recovered from a COVID-19 infection.

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed an electronic patch that can monitor biomolecules in deep tissues, including hemoglobin. This gives medical professionals unprecedented access to crucial information that could help spot life-threatening conditions such as malignant tumors, organ dysfunction, cerebral or gut hemorrhages and more.

Researchers have developed a novel genome assembly tool that could spur the development of new treatments for tuberculosis and other bacterial infections.

The new tool, which has created an improved genome map of one tuberculosis strain, should do likewise for other strains and other types of bacteria, according to researchers whose findings appeared in Nature Communications.

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports the identification of a previously unknown genetic cause of a late-onset cerebellar ataxia, a discovery that will improve diagnosis and open new treatment avenues for this progressive condition.

Researchers from the University of Jyväskylä and the Central Finland Health Care District have developed an AI based neural network to detect an early knee osteoarthritis from x-ray images. AI was able to match a doctors’ diagnosis in 87% of cases. The result is important because x-rays are the primary diagnostic method for early knee osteoarthritis. An early diagnosis can save the patient from unnecessary examinations, treatments and even knee joint replacement surgery.

Autoimmune diseases are thought to be the result of mistaken identity. Immune cells on patrol, armed and ready to defend the body against invading pathogens, mistake normal human cells for infected cells and turn their weapons on their own healthy tissues. In most cases, though, finding the source of the confusion the tiny fragment of normal human protein that looks dangerously similar to a protein from a pathogen  has been challenging for scientists.

Besides the skin, the digestive tract is the tissue that is most exposed to environmental influences such as bacteria and viruses. Therefore, cells that form these barriers to the interior of the body also have special defence mechanisms. A research team led by Professor Dr Thorsten Hoppe has now shown that RNA interference, or RNAi for short, which is known to be a viral defence mechanism, also prevents the overproduction of the body’s own proteins in intestinal cells.

A small molecule inhibitor that attacks the difficult to target, cancer-causing gene mutation KRAS, found in nearly 30 percent of all human tumors, successfully shrunk tumors or stopped cancer growth in preclinical models of pancreatic cancer, researchers from Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center showed, suggesting the drug is a strong candidate for clinical trials. The study was published today in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.