Every cell in the body, whether skin or muscle or brain, starts out as a generic cell that acquires its unique characteristics after undergoing a process of specialization. Nowhere is this process more dramatic than it is in red blood cells. In order to make as much room as possible for the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin, pretty much everything else inside these precursor red blood cells - nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes and more - gets purged.

Every gene in (almost) every cell of the body is present in two variants - so called alleles: one is deriving from the mother, the other one from the father. In most cases both alleles are active and transcribed by the cells into an RNA message. However, for a few genes, only one allele is expressed, while the other one is silenced.

When an investigational prescription drug shows promise for treating a serious illness or filling an unmet medical need, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has special programs available to expedite its clinical testing and approval. One is the "Accelerated Approval" pathway, in which the FDA will accept weaker-than-usual evidence of the drug's efficacy from its pre-clinical trials.

Pancreatic cancer is now the third leading cause of cancer mortality. Its incidence is increasing in parallel with the population increase in obesity, and its five-year survival rate still hovers at just 8 to 9 percent. Research led by Nada Kalaany, PhD, at Boston Children's Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, now suggests a novel approach to treating this deadly cancer: targeting an enzyme that tumors use to get rid of nitrogen.

Light-to-moderate drinking can lower risk of mortality from all-causes and cardiovascular disease, while heavy drinking can significantly increase risk of mortality from all-causes and cancer, according to a new study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. High alcohol consumption has been liked to a host of health issues, including cardiovascular disease, but alcohol in moderation is widely recommended.

Give your medicine a jolt. By using electrochemistry, future pharmaceuticals - including many of the top prescribed medications in the United States - soon may be easily scaled up to be manufactured in a more sustainable way. Currently, making pharmaceuticals involves creating complex organic molecules that require several chemical steps and intense energy.

In light of a huge increase in recent years in the number of meta-analyses published annually about prevention and treatment of heart disease as well as in other fields, the American Heart Association (AHA) published a scientific statement to provide recommendations for physicians and researchers who wish to do meta-analyses, journal editors who publish them, and health care professionals who wish to use them to make decisions about patient care.