A new Scientific Reports paper puts an evolutionary twist on a classic question. Instead of asking why we get cancer, Leonardo Oña of Osnabrück University and Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute use signaling theory to explore how our bodies have evolved to keep us from getting more cancer.

A modified form of poliovirus, pioneered at Duke Cancer Institute as a therapy for glioblastoma brain tumors, appears in laboratory studies to also have applicability for pediatric brain tumors when used as part of a cancer vaccine. In preclinical studies using mice and human cancer cells, an injection of the modified poliovirus vector instigated an immune response that homed in on mutated cancer cells that predominate in diffuse midline glioma (DMG) tumors. The cancer strikes children and is universally deadly.

Research by a University of Georgia psychologist shows that targeting one particular symptom of schizophrenia has a positive effect on other symptoms, offering significant promise for treating an aspect of schizophrenia that currently has no pharmaceutical options.

A team led by Gregory Strauss published a study confirming that successfully treating the symptom avolition - reduced motivation - has a positive effect on other negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Drug development is an extremely arduous and costly process, and failure rates in clinical trials that test new drugs for their safety and efficacy in humans remain very high. According to current estimates, only 13.8% of all tested drugs demonstrate ultimate clinical success and obtain approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Biomedical data scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that the number of genes a cell uses to make RNA is a reliable indicator of how developed the cell is, a finding that could make it easier to target cancer-causing genes. Cells that initiate cancer are thought to be stem cells, which are hard-to-find cells that can reproduce themselves and develop, or

In 2018, 1.7 million people died from lung cancer worldwide, a number equivalent to the population of Barcelona. The high mortality rate of lung cancer reflects the need for the development of treatments that are more efficient. A study headed by Ángel R. Nebreda, ICREA researcher and head of the Signalling and Cell Cycle Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and published in the

Our genome consists of 20,000 genes, all of which may be capable of triggering disease. It is estimated that there are 7,000 unknown genes that cause recessive genetic diseases resulting from mutations in two copies of a gene that have been inherited from each parent. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have recently identified 45 new genes that cause blindness or cognitive problems.