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).

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,

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.

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.

Scientists are finding clues for how to treat diabetes and hormone disorders in an unexpected place: a toxin from one of the most venomous animals on the planet.

A multinational research team led by University of Utah scientists has identified a component within the venom of a deadly marine cone snail, the geography cone, that mimics a human hormone called somatostatin, which regulates the levels of blood sugar and various hormones in the body.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help identify molecules that could serve as new drugs for mental health disorders. AI can be used to predict the three-dimensional structures of important receptors and thereby speed up the development of potential drugs. This is the result of a new study from Uppsala University published in Science Advances.

In drug development, experimental methods are often used to determine the three-dimensional structures of target proteins and to understand how molecules bind to them.

RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics have garnered significant attention in clinical research due to their potential for treating various diseases, including genetic disorders, viral infections and cancer. These therapeutics can target and silence disease-causing genes with high precision, minimizing off-target effects and improving treatment outcomes.

As the number of RNAi-based treatment studies expands, questions about how long RNAi benefits can last and if it’s possible to fine-tune RNAi need to be answered.