A team of researchers says it has linked sensitivity to an allergen in red meat to the buildup of plaque in the arteries of the heart. While high saturated fat levels in red meat have long been known to contribute to heart disease for people in general, the new finding suggests that a subgroup of the population may be at heightened risk for a different reason - a food allergen.

Biology is swaddled in lipids: fats, oils, and even waxes envelop cells and their organelles, mediate the flow of vast biological information networks, protect fragile tissues, and store essential energy across multiple organisms. But despite their importance, lipids have traditionally been among the hardest biomolecules to study because of the diversity of their molecular structures, which are not determined by the well-defined building blocks and simple rules that govern DNA, RNA, and proteins.

An invisible particle enters your lungs. The next thing you know breathing becomes difficult. You are having as asthma attack. Asthma is one of the most common and difficult to endure chronic conditions. About 30 million Americans experience asthma attacks and 3 million have a severe, therapy-resistant form of the disease. In some cases, the condition can be fatal.

Between 2013 and 2016, West Africa suffered the most severe outbreak of Ebola ever recorded. In Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, a total of 29,000 patients were diagnosed with the disease. More than 11,000 people didn't survive. The epidemic has now passed, but researchers are wondering which intervention strategies would have been most effective in containing the disease.

The average pre-approval cost of research and development for a successful drug is estimated to be US$2.6 billion and the number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950. More than 90% of drug candidates entering clinical trials fail to gain regulatory approval, mainly as a result of insufficient efficacy and/or unacceptable toxicity, because of the limited predictive value of preclinical, animal-based studies.

As clinical trials gear up with the aim of attaining the first FDA-approved treatments for mitochondrial disease, a new study reports for the first time what patients and families say would motivate them for or against participating in such research trials. Based in malfunctions in mitochondria, the tiny structures within cells that act as biological batteries, mitochondrial disease is a highly variable collection of energy deficiency disorders that can affect nearly any and all organs and systems - at any age.

A novel approach to immunotherapy developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has led to the complete regression of breast cancer in a patient who was unresponsive to all other treatments. This patient received the treatment in a clinical trial led by Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Surgery Branch at NCI's Center for Cancer Research (CCR), and the findings were published June 4, 2018 in Nature Medicine. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health.