Scientists at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute found that a deep-water marine sponge collected off of Fort Lauderdale's coast contains leiodermatolide, a natural product that has the ability to inhibit the growth of cancer cells as well as block cancer cells from dividing using extremely low concentrations of the compound.

An international team of researchers - led by scientists at UC San Francisco, Stanford University, the University of North Carolina (UNC), and the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany - has developed a new opioid drug candidate that blocks pain without triggering the dangerous side effects of current prescription painkillers. Their secret?

Intestinal flora has multiple influences on human health, but researchers have revealed that it is also likely to have an effect on the body's response to drugs. Recent research from Kumamoto University in Japan strongly suggests that changes in the intestinal flora, caused by antibacterial and antibiotic drugs or individual differences between people, may have an effect on a person's response to drugs including side effects.

Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just achieved a spectacular breakthrough in cancer research. They have developed new nanorobotic agents capable of navigating through the bloodstream to administer a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumours.

EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) scientists design a new method to cheaply produce some of the most important chemical compounds in the pharmaceutical industry - the amines. The amines are one of the most important classes of chemical compounds today. Amines that contain a ring-like structure - called an "aryl" group - are used widely in pharmaceuticals, such as the top-selling drugs Abilify, Crestor, Gleevec, and Lidoderm.

Malignant cancers strike certain organs, such as the colon or breast, more often than others. In an Opinion publishing August 9 in Trends in Cancer, researchers propose that this vulnerability in some organs may be due to natural selection. Humans can tolerate tumors in large or paired organs more easily than in small, critical organs,

Tumor shrinkage is not the only measure of a successful anti-cancer therapy. A University of Colorado Cancer Center article published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology describes a promising alternative: metabolic imaging. Tumors rush their metabolism to grow and proliferate.