A clinical trial to test the effectiveness of a stem cell therapy among adults with difficult to treat Crohn's disease has found it is not significantly better than conventional treatment in producing sustained disease remission after one year. Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract causing pain and diarrhoea that can mean life-long ill health, impaired quality of life and reduced life expectancy.

Researchers have been working for years to develop an artificial pancreas in the lab to help the millions of people with type 1 diabetes. But what if the answer is to "recycle" the more than 300 human pancreata from organ donors that aren't currently being used? Online ahead of print in the Annals of Surgery, regenerative medicine researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine and colleagues report on the potential to use human pancreata as the "hardware" of a new-generation, bio-artificial pancreas.

Ground-breaking new Danish research has shown that the current scientific description of the human cell cycle needs to be revised. These findings could also lead to the development of new therapeutic approaches to target an Achilles' heel in different types of cancers.

Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have deployed a powerful new drug discovery technique to identify an anti-diabetes compound with a novel mechanism of action. The finding, which appeared online ahead of print in Nature Communications, may lead to a new type of diabetes treatment.

Researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James) have developed nanoparticles that swell and burst when exposed to near-infrared laser light.

The success of proteasome inhibitors such as VELCADE® (bortezomib) and Kyprolis® (carfilzomib) for the treatment of multiple myeloma has shown that protein homeostasis, which is how cells maintain a balance of protein synthesis and degradation, is a valid pathway for developing drugs to treat cancer. However, attacking the proteasome in solid tumors has not worked to date.

Engineers at the University of Sheffield have discovered that tiny spherical bead-like devices can be guided by physical structures while swimming inside fluids. This opens up a wealth of future possibilities, such as using structures in the body to guide drug delivery, or cracks in rocks to direct environmental clean-up and exploration.