A team of Russian scientists together with foreign colleagues found out that the venom of crab spider Heriaeus melloteei may be used as a basis for developing treatment against hypokalemic periodic paralysis. This disease is caused by genetic mutation that leads to the occurrence of the so-called ω-currents or leakage currents via voltage-gated ion channels Nav1.4 in skeletal muscles.

Older adults who take a novel antioxidant that specifically targets cellular powerhouses, or mitochondria, see age-related vascular changes reverse by the equivalent of 15 to 20 years within six weeks, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research. The study, published this week in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting pharmaceutical-grade nutritional supplements, or nutraceuticals, could play an important role in preventing heart disease-the nation's No. 1 killer.

In addition to remembering to take the medication prescribed by their cardiologists at the right times and going to the trouble of making healthy lifestyle changes, patients with high blood pressure (hypertension) can include a pleasing beneficial activity in routine treatment of the disease thanks to the discovery that listening to music significantly enhances the effect of anti-hypertensive drugs.

One class of drug used to treat type 2 diabetes may not reduce the risk of death when compared with placebo, suggests new findings. The research, led by scientists from Imperial College London and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, studied three types of diabetes treatment: sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists, and dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP-4) inhibitors.

A new type of cancer vaccine has yielded promising results in an initial clinical trial conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The personalized vaccine is made from patients' own immune cells, which are exposed in the laboratory to the contents of the patients' tumor cells, and then injected into the patients to initiate a wider immune response.

Researchers have discovered a new class of drug that has the potential to help cancer patients who no longer respond to existing therapies. The drug may not become available to patients for a number of years yet, but researchers believe that if clinical trials are successful, it could be used to tackle a variety of treatment-resistant cancers.

In a groundbreaking development, results from a recent clinical trial to treat lung cancer show that a novel immunotherapy combination is surprisingly effective at controlling the disease's progression. The study, published April 4 in the journal The Lancet Oncology, focused on non-small cell lung cancer, which is the most common form of lung cancer.