Every year the approach of flu season sets off a medical guessing game with life or death consequences. There are many different strains of flu and they vary from year to year. So each season authorities must make an educated guess and tell manufacturers which variants of the flu they should produce vaccines against.

Patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) treated with an experimental vaccine made from the patient's own resected tumor tissue showed an improved survival compared with historical patients who received the standard of care alone, according to an analysis of a phase 2 trial of this vaccine that was recently published in the journal Neuro-Oncology and accompanied by an editorial highlighting the importance of the trial.

Taking the breast cancer drug anastrozole for five years reduced the chances of post-menopausal women at high risk of breast cancer developing the disease by 53% compared with women who took a placebo, according to a study published in the Lancet. The results of the IBIS II trial, funded by Cancer Research UK and led by Queen Mary University of London, could offer a new option for preventing breast cancer in high risk post-menopausal women which is more effective than tamoxifen and has fewer side-effects.

As more reports appear of a grim "post-antibiotic era" ushered in by the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, a new strategy for fighting infection is emerging that targets a patient's cells rather than those of the invading pathogens. The technique interferes with the way that the pathogens take over a patient's cells to cause infection.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL), known colloquially as "good cholesterol", protects against dangerous deposits in the arteries. An important function of HDL is its anti-inflammatory properties. An international research team at the Institute of Innate Immunity at the University Hospital of Bonn and the LIMES Institute at the University of Bonn has identified a central switch by which HDL controls the inflammatory response.

Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) have made a discovery that could lead to better treatment for patients suffering from brain cancer. Despite current treatment strategies, the median survival for patients with the most aggressive brain cancer - called glioblastoma, is 15 months. Less than five per cent of patients survive beyond five years.

Coffee and beer are polar opposites in the beverage world. Coffee picks you up, and beer winds you down. Now Prof. Martin Kupiec and his team at Tel Aviv University's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology have discovered that the beverages may also have opposite effects on your genome. Working with a kind of yeast that shares many important genetic similarities with humans, the researchers found that caffeine shortens and alcohol lengthens telomeres - the end points of chromosomal DNA, implicated in aging and cancer.