Cancer scientists overestimate the extent to which high-profile preclinical studies can be successfully replicated, new research from McGill University suggests. Thes findings, published in PLOS Biology by Jonathan Kimmelman and colleagues from McGill, are based on a survey in which both experts and novices were asked to predict whether mouse experiments in six prominent preclinical cancer studies conducted by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) would reproduce the effects observed in original studies.

An inexpensive fertility drug, which has been available for more than 50 years and can be taken orally, has proved as effective as other more costly hormones when used for ovarian stimulation before intrauterine stimulation (IUI). Investigator Dr Noor Danhof from the AMC Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Amsterdam says the results of the study, a large randomised trial performed in the Netherlands, now make this "least expensive and least invasive stimulation agent" the drug of choice in IUI.

A National Institutes of Health-funded study led by a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has shown that an influenza vaccine can produce robust immune responses and be administered safely with an experimental patch of dissolving microneedles. The method is an alternative to needle-and-syringe immunization; with further development, it could eliminate the discomfort of an injection as well as the inconvenience and expense of visiting a flu clinic.

A study led by scientists at Monash University has shown that a new therapy developed through stem cell technology holds promise as a treatment for chronic asthma. The Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) scientists provided the experimental expertise to test Cynata Therapeutics' induced pluripotent stem cell-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in a model of experimental asthma.

Stem cells are considered biological allrounders because they have the potential to develop into the various body cell types. For the majority of stem cells, however, this designation is too far-reaching. Adult stem cells, for example, can replace cells in their own tissue in case of injury, but a fat stem cell will never generate a nerve or liver cell. Scientists therefore distinguish between multipotent adult stem cells and the actual allrounders - the pluripotent embryonic stem cells.

Cancer tumours manipulate a natural cell process to promote their survival suggesting that controlling this mechanism could stop progress of the disease, according to new research led by the University of Oxford. Non-sense mediated decay (NMD) is a natural physiological process that provides cells with the ability to detect DNA errors called nonsense mutations.

Discovered more than two decades ago, the hormone leptin has been widely hailed as the key regulator of leanness. Yet, the pivotal experiments that probe the function of this protein and unravel the precise mechanism of its action as a guardian against obesity are largely missing. These are the conclusions in a commentary published in Cell Metabolism by Harvard Medical School metabolism experts Jeffrey Flier and Eleftheria Maratos-Flier.