Results of an early-stage clinical trial of two experimental vaccines against Ebola and Marburg viruses - the first to be completed in an African country - showed that they were safe and induced immune responses in healthy Ugandan adult volunteers. Developed by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, the experimental vaccines (called DNA vaccines) were predecessors to a next-generation candidate vaccine, called the NIAID/GSK Ebola vaccine, which is currently in clinical development.

Programmed cell death is a mechanism that causes defective and potentially harmful cells to destroy themselves. It serves a number of purposes in the body, including the prevention of malignant tumor growth. Now, researchers at Technische Universität München (TUM) have discovered a previously unknown mechanism for regulating programmed cell death.

Nutrition experts are continually debating the nutritional value of carbohydrate-containing foods and whether some are healthier than others. High carbohydrate foods are classified by how much they increase blood sugar; known as glycemic index. In new findings led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, researchers looked at

A brand new family of cancer drugs designed to block several key cancer-causing proteins at once could potentially treat incurable skin cancers, a major new study reports. Clinical trials to test the new drugs in patients should begin as early as 2015. Existing drugs target faulty versions of a protein called BRAF which drives about half of all melanomas, but while initially very effective, the cancers almost always become resistant to treatment within a year.

One of the reasons cancer is so deadly is that it can evade attack from the body's immune system, which allows tumors to flourish and spread. Scientists can try to induce the immune system, known as immunotherapy, to go into attack mode to fight cancer and to build long lasting immune resistance to cancer cells. Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) show a non-surgical injection of programmable biomaterial that spontaneously assembles in vivo into a 3D structure could fight and even help prevent cancer and also infectious disease such as HIV.

Develop 100 drugs in 10 years. That's the ambitious goal set by a group of scientists and engineers at the University of Utah, founders of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company that is able to quickly and affordably identify unexpected ways a drug could be used by testing it on diseased cells.

A new type of cancer therapy that targets an oncometabolite produced dramatic results in patients with advanced leukemia in an early-phase clinical trial. The study, led by Eytan M. Stein, MD, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.