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.

Poor animal study design and reporting thwarts the ethical review of proposed human drug trials, according to a study led by researchers at Hannover Medical School, Germany, in cooperation with researchers from McGill University, Canada. The study, publishing 5 April in the open access journal PLOS Biology, analyzed the descriptions of animal studies found in "investigator brochures" -

Making drugs cheaper doesn't always require pricey investments. A joint initiative by researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the Dutch company Syncom BV and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital proves just that. What started out as a Bachelor project at TU/e laid the foundation for a much cheaper production of the promising cancer drug Z-endoxifen.

Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) in hospitals play a vital role in managing the threat of antibiotic resistance. To be of maximum effectiveness, essential elements of ASP programs need to be identified and standardized. Previous efforts in identifying the key components of ASPs have been confined to high-income countries. In a study to be published in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection, researchers identify essential elements of ASPs that could be applicable to hospitals in both high-income and low-income countries.