A UCLA-led team of scientists has developed a new technique that will enable researchers to easily and quickly determine the structures of organic molecules using very small samples. The work is already drawing significant attention in the scientific community: A preview of the paper that was posted on the website ChemRxiv was downloaded 19,000 times in 24 hours, shattering the site's previous record of 15,000 downloads in six months.

A new paper published by McGill University researchers in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that some clinical trials may promote the use of ineffective and costly treatments. That's the opposite of what clinical trials are aimed at, namely preventing ineffective and costly treatments from being taken up by physicians and patients.

Probiotics are a multibillion-dollar industry with marketing claims of being an effective treatment for a multitude of ailments, including diarrhea. However, findings from a new study from the University of Calgary show the popular product has no effect on gastroenteritis, commonly yet erroneously called the stomach flu, in children.

One of the most successful techniques to combat multidrug resistance in cancer cells is the downregulation of those genes responsible for drug resistance. Chinese scientists have now developed a nanoplatform that selectively delivers small hairpin RNA transcription templates and chemotherapeutics into multidrug-resistant tumors. A deadly cocktail of gene-silencing elements and chemotherapeutic drugs effectively and selectively kills cells, they reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Both aspirin and a purified omega-3, called EPA, reduce the number of pre-cancerous polyps in patients found to be at high risk of developing bowel cancer, according to new research. A clinical trial, led by the University of Leeds, found that both aspirin and EPA reduced the number of bowel polyps in patients one year on from a screening colonoscopy (large bowel camera test), although they did not reduce the chances of an individual having any polyps present in the bowel.

The Peptides and Proteins lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) has published a paper in Chemical Communications describing the capacity of a small molecule (peptide) derived from chlorotoxin, found in scorpion venom (Giant Yellow Israeli scorpion), to carry drugs across the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

If patient engagement is the new 'blockbuster drug,' why are we not seeing spectacular effects? A team of researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Berkeley School of Public Health at UC Berkeley recently conducted a study designed to help answer that question and to better understand how patient engagement and activation (PAE) practices