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.

Each second of our lives, cells in our body grow and divide to ensure we stay healthy. However, this process has a dark side: if cell growth and divisions become excessive, that may cause cancer. To keep a safe balance, our cells are equipped with several molecular mechanisms to limit their own growth and division.

EMBL Hamburg's Wilmanns Group, in collaboration with research groups from the Center for Experimental Medicine Institute of Tumor Biology and the Martini Clinic at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), as well as the Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute, has revealed a new mechanism

A class of drugs already on the market to lower blood pressure appears to reduce adults' risk of developing epilepsy, Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues have discovered. The finding comes out of an analysis of the medical records of more than 2 million Americans taking blood pressure medications.

The study, published June 17 in JAMA Neurology, suggests that the drugs, called angiotensin receptor blockers, could prevent epilepsy in people at highest risk of the disease, including older adults who have had strokes.

Tuberculosis is still one of the deadliest infectious diseases, causing over one million deaths each year worldwide. On the other hand, about one-fourth of the world's population carries Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) without showing any symptoms, and most of these carriers do not develop the disease.

The current anti-tuberculosis vaccine, BCG, is administered worldwide. However, considering that more than 10 million new tuberculosis cases are reported each year, its effectiveness is deemed insufficient.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, have developed a new nanomedicine therapy that delivers anticancer drugs to lung cancer cells and enhances the immune system's ability to fight cancer. The team showed promising results for the new therapy in cancer cells in the lab and in mouse lung tumor models, with potential applications for improving care and outcomes for patients with tumors that have failed to respond to traditional immunotherapy. Their findings are published in Science Advances.

Immune system cells called macrophages play an unexpected role in the complicated connection between obesity and cancer, a Vanderbilt University Medical Center-led research team has discovered.

Obesity increases the frequency of macrophages in tumors and induces their expression of the immune checkpoint protein PD-1 - a target of cancer immunotherapies. The findings, published June 12 in the journal Nature, provide a mechanistic explanation for how obesity can contribute to both increased cancer risk and enhanced responses to immunotherapy.

Proteins are workhorses that carry out most of the biological functions in our cells. While the genes we inherit from our parents, our so-called genome, are fixed and usually remain unchanged throughout our lives, proteins in our bodies are constantly changing, as we age, under different health conditions and upon stimulation, such as with medical treatment.

This makes monitoring proteins and their molecular changes - the study of proteomics - beneficial for drug discovery, disease diagnosis and health management.