Multiple sclerosis manifests itself in many different ways and different courses. A recent effort to fine-tune descriptions - or phenotypes - of MS was undertaken by an international team of leaders in MS research and clinical care. The results of this effort by the International Advisory Committee on Clinical Trials in MS, including recommendations for more research, has just been published (Neurology 2014;83:1).

A study by Belgian doctoral researcher Wouter De Haes (KU Leuven) and colleagues provides new evidence that metformin, the world's most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows ageing and increases lifespan. In experiments reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers tease out the mechanism behind metformin's age-slowing effects: the drug causes an increase in the number of toxic oxygen molecules released in the cell and this, surprisingly, increases cell robustness and longevity in the long term.

The first preclinical study of a new Rice University-developed anti-cancer technology found that a novel combination of existing clinical treatments can instantaneously detect and kill only cancer cells - often by blowing them apart - without harming surrounding normal organs. The research, which is available online this week Nature Medicine, reports that Rice's "quadrapeutics" technology was 17 times more efficient than conventional chemoradiation therapy against aggressive, drug-resistant head and neck tumors.

A mechanism that enables the development of resistance to Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) anticancer drugs, thereby leading to relapse, has been identified by Katherine Borden of the University of Montreal's Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) and her collaborators. Katherine Borden is a Principal Investigator at IRIC and a professor at the university's Department of Pathology and Cell Biology.

The agency charged to protect patients from dangerous drug side effects needs to be far more vigilant when it comes to medications that affect blood pressure. Robert P. Blankfield, MD, MS, a clinical professor of family medicine, issues this call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in an editorial published recently in an online edition of the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics; the print version of the article is expected to appear this autumn.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reported a discovery that they hope will lead to the development of a powerful new way of treating an aggressive form of breast cancer. The breast cancer subtype in question is commonly called "HER2-positive"; it's a subset of the disease affecting about one patient in four, in which tumor cells overexpress a signaling protein called HER2.

Scientists have found a way to target elusive cells that suppress immune response, depleting them with peptides that spare other important cells and shrink tumors in preclinical experiments, according to a paper published online by Nature Medicine.