Science and Health News

In a new study, published in Cell Reports, researchers from Queen Mary University of London used cells derived from urine to take the first step in generating an artificial adrenal gland, which could help develop future treatments for adrenal gland disorders.

Men with type 2 diabetes are less likely to develop prostate cancer than patients without diabetes. However, the mortality rate is higher. Researchers of the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) from Tübingen and experts of Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Urology Department of Tübingen University Hospital were able to show that in the affected individuals the androgen receptor and the mitogenic forms of the insulin receptor were more strongly expressed. This could explain why patients with diabetes have a poorer prognosis for prostate cancer. The current results were published in the journals Molecular Metabolism and Endocrine Related Cancer.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University and Kansai University has developed DNA-assisted molecular robots that autonomously swarm in response to chemical and physical signals, paving the way for developing future nano-machines.

A blood test for Alzheimer’s disease, developed and validated by scientists from Japan and Australia, could speed up the pace of Alzheimer’s disease drug trials.

CANCER stem cells can be put “into hibernation” by a little-known drug called diphenyleniodonium – or DPI – according to researchers from the University of Salford, UK.

Bursting oxygen-filled microbubbles in breast cancer makes tumors three times more sensitive to radiation therapy in preliminary tests with animal models of the disease.

Pancreatic cancer is a form of cancer associated with the highest mortality rates in the world. However, until now genetic changes that could explain the aggressiveness and early metastasis of this form of cancer had not been found. A team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) has now shown that those characteristics can be explained by specific gene amplifications which occur along various evolutionary pathways of the cancer. Based on this discovery, they have derived basic principles underlying the biology of this cancer type.

Findings could help ID risk of disease earlier