An experimental cancer drug works differently than intended and shows significant promise for stopping melanoma and possibly other forms of cancer, research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests. The findings also indicate the drug may be effective against melanomas that have resisted other forms of treatment. The drug, pevonedistat, is already being tested in people.

Researchers at the University of Bristol and Afferent Pharmaceuticals have identified a potential new way of treating high blood pressure, or hypertension, by targeting aberrant nerve signals in the carotid bodies, which sit on the common carotid arteries on each side of the neck. The research study, entitled "Purinergic receptors in the carotid body as a new drug target for controlling hypertension," was led by Julian Paton, professor of physiology at the University of Bristol, and was published in the 5 September online edition of Nature Medicine.

Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample, in millisecond time intervals, proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing, and weaving, a research team from UC San Diego and Monash University in Australia has identified promising drug leads that may selectively combat heart disease, from arrhythmias to cardiac failure.

Although the causes of Alzheimer's disease are still unknown, it is clear that the disease commences with progressive amyloid deposition in the brains of affected persons between ten and fifteen years before the emergence of initial clinical symptoms such as memory loss. Researchers have now been able to show that Aducanumab, a human monoclonal antibody, selectively binds brain amyloid plaques, thus enabling microglial cells to remove the plaques.

A study published in the journal Scientific Reports from Nature publishing group, describes the mechanism by which caffeine counteracts age-related cognitive deficits in animals. The study coordinated by Portuguese researchers from Instituto de Medicina Molecular (iMM Lisboa) and collaborators from Inserm in Lille, France, along with teams from Germany and United States,

New generation drug eluting stents (new DES) did not outshine contemporary bare metal stents (BMS) as they were expected to, in a surprise finding of the largest randomized stent trial to date. The Norwegian Coronary Stent Trial (NorStent), presented at ESC Congress 2016, and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine, "demonstrates that the efficacy of new DES versus contemporary BMS is lower than expected,"

A simple adjustment to patients' therapeutic regimen may improve the effectiveness of the standard epigenetic treatment for myeloid dysplastic syndrome (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). New findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed in lab studies that supplementing an epigenetic cancer drug called decitabine with vitamin C enhanced the drug's ability to