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.

With Americans spending billions of dollars each year on nutritional supplements, researchers have analyzed popular eye vitamins to determine whether their formulations and claims are consistent with scientific findings. They determined that some of the top-selling products do not contain identical ingredient dosages to eye vitamin formulas proven effective in clinical trials.

Pragmatic clinical trials - real-life tests done in real-world settings - are increasingly important for answering pressing questions about how best to deliver health care. But these pragmatic trials require close collaboration between two professional groups who often have contrasting styles. One group is researchers, who follow structure like classical musicians.

Few classes of drugs have had such a transformative effect on the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) as have statins, prescribed to reduce total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. However, some clinicians have ongoing concerns regarding the potential for lens opacities (cataracts) as a result of statin use. In an article in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, researchers report increased risk for cataracts in patients treated with statins.