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.

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.