A new study led by investigators from Mass Eye and Ear found that patients prescribed semaglutide (as Ozempic or Wegovy) for diabetes or weight loss had a higher risk of having a potentially blinding eye condition called NAION than similar patients who had not been prescribed these drugs.

Notably, the study found people with diabetes who had been prescribed semaglutide by their physician and then filled the prescription were more than four times more likely to be diagnosed with NAION.

Twelve years ago, cancer researchers at University of California San Diego identified a molecule that helps cancer cells survive by shuttling damaging inflammatory cells into tumor tissue. In new research, they show that the same molecule does the same thing in lung tissue infected with COVID-19 - and that the molecule can be suppressed with a repurposed cancer drug.

New UCSF study shows that suppressing a protein turns ordinary fat into a calorie burner and may explain why drug trials attempting the feat haven’t been successful.

Researchers at UC San Francisco have figured out how to turn ordinary white fat cells, which store calories, into beige fat cells that burn calories to maintain body temperature.

When a cancer cell doesn't respond to traditional therapies, doctors may turn to a sort of viral biological warfare, by deploying 'troops' in the form of viral agents that are specifically engineered to target and eliminate cancer cells. The mode of attack is to transform the tumor into an immunologically "hot" environment, making it more visible and recognisable to our immune system.

Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are becoming a major societal challenge. To solve this problem, researchers are working on new drugs that kill bacteria without developing resistance, and on new materials that prevent the formation of bacterial biofilms. The latter are the source of resistant variants but are notoriously difficult to remove. Recently, researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences have discovered that making the surface undulated can help limit the spread of resistant bacteria.

AlphaFold is an outstanding example of artificial intelligence's computational capabilities in accurately predicting intricate protein structures. A new Review article explores AlphaFold's recent advancements and its potential impact on predictive medicine. The article is published in the peer-reviewed journal AI in Precision Oncology.

Vivek Subbiah, MD, from the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, and coauthors, describe a shift toward predictive medicine,

A new AI-powered program will allow researchers to level up their drug discovery efforts.

The program, called TopoFormer, was developed by an interdisciplinary team led by Guowei Wei, a Michigan State University Research Foundation Professor in the Department of Mathematics. TopoFormer translates three-dimensional information about molecules into data that typical AI-based drug-interaction models can use, expanding those models' abilities to predict how effective a drug might be.