One of the most common combined oral contraceptive pills has a negative impact on women's quality of life but does not increase depressive symptoms. This is shown by a major randomised, placebo-controlled study conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics. The results have been published in the scientific journal Fertility and Sterility.

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC) have discovered a new mechanism of action of metoprolol, a drug that can reduce the damage produced during a heart attack if administered early. The team led by Dr. Borja Ibáñez, Clinical Research Director at the CNIC and cardiologist at the Fundación Jiménez Díaz University Hospital Health Research Institute (IIS-FJD), has identified the mechanism that explains why this drug is so beneficial: rapid administration of metoprolol during a heart attack directly inhibits the inflammatory action of neutrophils, a type of blood cell.

The most complex organ in humans is the brain. Due to its complexity and, of course, for ethical reasons, it is extremely difficult to do scientific experiments on it - ones that could help us to understand neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, for example. Scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have now succeeded in turning human stem cells derived from skin samples into tiny, three-dimensional, brain-like cultures that behave very similarly to cells in the human midbrain.

The first live-attenuated Zika vaccine still in the development stage completely protected mice against the virus after a single vaccination dose, according to new research from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Instituto Evandro Chagas at the Ministry of Health in Brazil. The findings are currently available in Nature Medicine.

More than 36 million people globally are affected by type 1 diabetes (T1D), a lifelong disorder where insulin producing cells are attacked and destroyed by the immune system resulting in deficient insulin production that requires daily blood glucose monitoring and administration of insulin. While successful outcomes from islet transplantations have been reported, very few patients can benefit from this therapeutic option due to limited access to cadaveric donor islets.

Australian scientists have uncovered a promising new approach to treating pancreatic cancer, by targeting the tissue around the tumour to make it 'softer' and more responsive to chemotherapy. The findings are published in Science Translational Medicine. In the study, which was carried out in mice and in patient-derived samples, researchers primed pancreatic tumours with a three-day course of Fasudil - a drug that 'slackens the ropes' of surrounding tissue to make tumours softer, and also makes the blood vessels around tumours 'leaky'.

Artificially intelligent algorithms can learn to identify amazingly subtle information, enabling them to distinguish between people in photos or to screen medical images as well as a doctor. But in most cases their ability to perform such feats relies on training that involves thousands to trillions of data points. This means artificial intelligence doesn't work all that well in situations where there is very little data, such as drug development.