Leading Alzheimer's disease researchers and a prominent patient advocate today published an analysis, "Single Endpoint for New Drug Approvals for Alzheimer's Disease," urging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to clarify and modernize its current approach for approving new treatments for Alzheimer's disease.

Bicycle Day on April 19 honors not the two-wheeled mode of transportation, but the colorful ride taken by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman who accidentally discovered LSD 74 years ago. In search of new medicines, Hoffman was trying to stabilize lysergic acid, a derivative of a fungal compound used in a migraine medicine. He ended up synthesizing a compound called lysergic acid diethylamine, or LSD. Later, he accidentally exposed himself to it and felt dizzy with hallucinations.

On World Tuberculosis Day, TB Alliance and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announced a licensing agreement for the clinical development of sutezolid, an antibiotic drug candidate which demonstrated encouraging results in early studies. The sublicense pertains to the development of sutezolid in combination with other TB drugs and follows the MPP’s license for the treatment signed with patent holder The Johns Hopkins University in January.

Medical researchers and IBM (NYSE: IBM) are asking the public's help in finding prospective treatments for childhood cancers, the top worldwide cause of death by disease for children. Scientists are searching for chemical drug candidates that can affect the key molecules and proteins that control cancer cells in several common childhood cancers. However, finding drug candidates is an expensive and slow process.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a new international guideline to help standardise how results from clinical trial studies are reported. Use of the COS-STAR guideline, which is published in PLOS Medicine, could increase the efficiency and value of clinical research across the globe.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.

This year's Nobel Laureate discovered and elucidated mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.

The EU-funded CHIC project (Computational Horizons In Cancer: Developing Meta- and Hyper-Multiscale Models and Repositories for In Silico Oncology) proposes the development of clinical trial driven tools, services and secure infrastructure that will support the creation of multiscale cancer hypermodels (integrative models). The latter are defined as choreographies of component models, each one describing a biological process at a characteristic spatiotemporal scale, and of relation models/metamodels defining the relations across scales.