Researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have developed a machine learning program that could score the risk of pancreatic cysts and recommend one of three treatment strategies – surgery, watchful waiting or discharge without follow-up – more accurately than current methods. The program could potentially reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries performed on pancreatic cysts with little to no potential of turning cancerous.

A team at Dartmouth University has shown that in fruit flies, stressful experiences could lead to epigenetic changes that led to a preference for ethanol-rich foods for several generation of offspring. 

To hear Peter Sorger tell it, the reproducibility crisis is a good news/bad news situation.His team's "strangely simple and encouraging message" about the reproducibility crisis, Sorger told BioWorld, is that "we know exactly how to solve it... In the totally ordinary doing of science, you can figure out how to make an assay reproducible." Sources of variability "can be subjected to empirical analysis, and you can develop reproducible protocols, with some effort." The bad news is that what bedevils reproducibility is harder to fix than quality control. "The current incentive structure of the scientific enterprise," Sorger said, "is not designed to encourage reproducible science."

Despite the arrival of FDA-approved tissue-agnostic targeted cancer therapies, there is increasing recognition that the response of tumors that are driven by the same oncogene differs according to their location.

Despite its rather specific name, macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) has multiple roles. One of those roles is to serve as a chaperone protein that helps the proper folding of superoxide dismutase (SOD1). 

In what may be the smallest double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials on record, researchers have shown that treating two individuals with drugs aimed at raising brain levels of glycine improved their psychotic symptoms.

The Warburg effect – the marked preference of tumors for fueling themselves via anaerobic metabolism – was described more than 90 years ago. Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1931, and research into the phenomenon long dominated the field of tumor metabolism. Over the past decade, however, there has been increased attention to the fact that tumor metabolism is deregulated in multiple ways beyond the Warburg effect.

The ultimate vision is pretty fantastical: A variety of synthetically engineered bacteria working together to diagnose – and even secrete proteins to treat – various inflammatory conditions or other immune-associated diseases. But researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School have taken another step along the path toward that goal.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have reported that a high proportion of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains were resistant to penicillin-class antibiotics, the beta-lactams, when they were treated with a combination of penicillins and beta-lactamase inhibitors. 

A research team at the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, is moving forward with the development of a vaccine against tauopathies, a neurodegenerative class of diseases that includes Alzheimer's disease, but while promising in the lab, it could take a decade to get an actual vaccine to market.