Stroke patients who survive a blood clot in the brain's blood vessels are prone to developing new blockages during their recovery periods, even if they receive vessel-clearing interventions. In an effort to avoid further clots, doctors at 57 sites around the U.S. tested a possible solution: the addition of anti-coagulant drugs to medicine that dissolves blood clots.

But results from the clinical trial, led by Opeolu Adeoye, MD, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicate two such drugs did not improve outcomes.

Investigators involved in a multicenter study co-led by Cedars-Sinai discovered a pathway by which immune cells prevent the lungs' protective barrier from healing after viral infections like COVID-19. The findings, published in Nature may lead to new therapeutic treatment options.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how viral infections can cause long-lasting effects - a condition called long COVID. Also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, long COVID has left a devastating trail of people who continue to live with long-term debilitation after infection.

Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses that infect other animals.

As part of a new study on hybrid immunity to the virus, the large, multi-institution research team led by The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient.

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.