Licorice is more than a candy people either love or hate - it may play a role in preventing or treating certain types of cancer, according to researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Gnanasekar Munirathinam and his research team are studying substances derived from the licorice plant Glycyrrhiza glabra to determine if they could be used to prevent or stop the growth of prostate cancer.

While cancer therapies targeting specific genes or disease pathways have extended lives, they can also lead to highly resistant tumors when small reservoirs of cancer cells survive treatment, grow, and spread.

Searching for ways to extend the survival benefit of targeted therapies, a team led by researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute identified a potential new tactic to disrupt the repair mechanism that cancer cells use after treatment, blunting their ability to regenerate.

A Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating various additional COVID-19 booster shots has begun enrolling adult participants in the United States. The trial aims to understand if different vaccine regimens - prototype and variant vaccines alone and in combinations - can broaden immune responses in adults who already have received a primary vaccination series and a first booster shot.

Researchers have shown a new compound delivered in a nasal spray is highly effective in preventing and treating COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant in mice.

The researchers, including at UBC, Université de Sherbrooke, and Cornell University, believe this is the first treatment of its kind proven to be effective against all COVID-19 variants of concern reported to date, including alpha, beta, gamma and delta.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a novel strategy for identifying potent miniature antibodies, so-called nanobodies, against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. The approach led to the discovery of multiple nanobodies that in cell cultures and mice effectively blocked infection with different SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Researchers at the George Washington University published findings from the world's largest cohort study showing that hospitalized patients with moderate COVID-19 who were given aspirin early on in their treatment had a lower risk of dying compared to patients who were not given aspirin.

Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to cure or even treat. Now, a new strategy devised by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine has succeeded in making pancreatic tumors visible to the immune systems of mice and vulnerable to immune attack, reducing cancer metastases by 87%. The paper describing the findings published online today in Science Translational Medicine.