Rudolph's nose is red because it is richly supplied with red blood cells which help to protect it from freezing and to regulate brain temperature. This superior "nasal microcirculation" is essential for pulling Santa Claus's sleigh under extreme temperatures, reveals a study in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com.

Results of a clinical trial that began in 2001 show that a gene therapy cocktail conveyed into the brain by a molecular special delivery vehicle may help extend the lives of children with Canavan disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. A report of the trial appears in the online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have identified an enzyme specifically linked to aggressive prostate cancer, and have also developed a compound that inhibits the ability of this molecule to promote the metastatic spread of the cancer. Their study, published in the online edition of Molecular Cancer Research, is the first to link the enzyme PRSS3 to prostate cancer.

A new stem cell-derived system for screening experimental drugs for cardiotoxicity could identify dangerous side effects early in the development process, thereby potentially saving time, lives and money, according to Evan F. Cromwell, PhD, of Molecular Devices, LLC, Sunnyvale, CA, in a presentation at the American Society for Cell Biology's Annual Meeting, Dec 17 in San Francisco.

A novel approach to identifying potential anticancer drug combinations revealed that pairing cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins with cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors might provide an effective approach to treating intractable melanomas driven by mutations in the NRAS and KRAS gene.

An international research collaboration led by scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the University of Dundee, in the U.K., have developed a way to efficiently and effectively make designer drugs that hit multiple protein targets at once. This accomplishment, described in the Dec. 13, 2012 issue of the journal Nature, may prove invaluable for developing drugs to treat many common human diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, cancer, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder.

A newly found understanding of receptor signaling may have revealed a better way to design drugs. A study from Nationwide Children's Hospital suggests that a newly identified group of proteins, alpha arrestins, may play a role in cell signaling that is crucial to new drug development. The study appears in PLOS ONE.