Researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and The Cleveland Clinic designed a way to screen brain tumor cells and identify potential drug targets missed by other methods. The team successfully used their technique to find a glioblastoma cancer gene that, when blocked, extends mouse survival rates. In a study published in Nature, the team implanted patient-derived glioblastoma cells in mice and measured gene activity in the growing brain tumors.

Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are not the same. They affect different regions of the brain and have distinct genetic and environmental risk factors. But at the biochemical level, these two neurodegenerative diseases start to look similar. That's how Emory scientists led by Keqiang Ye, PhD, landed on a potential drug target for Parkinson's.

Cancer scientists overestimate the extent to which high-profile preclinical studies can be successfully replicated, new research from McGill University suggests. Thes findings, published in PLOS Biology by Jonathan Kimmelman and colleagues from McGill, are based on a survey in which both experts and novices were asked to predict whether mouse experiments in six prominent preclinical cancer studies conducted by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) would reproduce the effects observed in original studies.

An inexpensive fertility drug, which has been available for more than 50 years and can be taken orally, has proved as effective as other more costly hormones when used for ovarian stimulation before intrauterine stimulation (IUI). Investigator Dr Noor Danhof from the AMC Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Amsterdam says the results of the study, a large randomised trial performed in the Netherlands, now make this "least expensive and least invasive stimulation agent" the drug of choice in IUI.

The majority of Americans over age 50 take two or more prescription medicines to prevent or treat health problems, and many of them say the cost weighs on their budget, a new poll finds. But many older adults aren't getting - or asking for - as much help as they could from their doctors and pharmacists to find lower-cost options, the new data reveal.

A National Institutes of Health-funded study led by a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has shown that an influenza vaccine can produce robust immune responses and be administered safely with an experimental patch of dissolving microneedles. The method is an alternative to needle-and-syringe immunization; with further development, it could eliminate the discomfort of an injection as well as the inconvenience and expense of visiting a flu clinic.

A study led by scientists at Monash University has shown that a new therapy developed through stem cell technology holds promise as a treatment for chronic asthma. The Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) scientists provided the experimental expertise to test Cynata Therapeutics' induced pluripotent stem cell-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in a model of experimental asthma.