Proteins have evolved to excel at everything from contracting muscles to digesting food to recognizing viruses. To engineer better proteins, including antibodies, scientists often iteratively mutate the amino acids - the units that are arranged in a sequence to make up proteins - in different positions until the resulting protein has an improved function, like eliciting a stronger immune response or capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere more efficiently.

A method to screen a wide variety of drug candidates without laborious purification steps could advance the fight against drug-resistant bacteria.

Efforts to combat the increasing threat of drug-resistant bacteria are being assisted by a new approach for streamlining the search for antimicrobial drug candidates, pioneered by researchers at Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Kazuki Yamamoto and Professor Satoshi Ichikawa of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Individuals diagnosed with prediabetes can reduce their long-term risk of death and diabetes-related health complications if they delay the onset of diabetes for just four years through diet and exercise. Guangwei Li of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and colleagues report these findings in a new study published July 9th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

Type 2 diabetes is associated with an increased risk of death and disability, and imposes a significant economic burden on individuals and societies worldwide.

Certain types of light have proven to be an effective, minimally invasive treatment for cancers located on or near the skin when combined with a light-activated drug. But deep-seated cancers, surrounded by tissue, blood and bone, have been beyond the reach of light's therapeutic effects.

To bring light's benefits to these harder-to-access cancers, engineers and scientists at the University of Notre Dame have devised a wireless LED device that can be implanted.

A new approach to treating the most malignant type of brain cancer - glioblastoma - has shown strong promise in pre-clinical settings, raising hopes of increasing current average survival rates beyond 18 months.

Targeted alpha therapy (TAT) is emerging as a potential additional treatment for glioblastoma (GB), a disease which has confounded oncologists for decades due to its aggressive nature and strong resistance to existing therapies.

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.