As far as targeting kinases goes, inhibition is the only game in town. But that is not because there's no need for activators.

French researchers identified new links between prion protein and Alzheimer's disease and have shown that by inhibiting the kinase PDK1, they were able to independently slow the disease progression in both prion disease and Alzheimer's disease in mice.

As far as targeting kinases goes, inhibition is the only game in town. But that is not because there's no need for activators.

Alzheimer's disease is characterized – among other things – by a dramatic upregulation of the complement cascade, as well as by massive loss of neural connection points or synapses.

Biomarkers would seem to have it all – they could save money for the health care system by saving patients ineffective care and its attendant toxicity risks. But considering how useful they are, there are a surprisingly low number of biomarkers in widespread clinical use. "The way it's been going for the last 30 years has resulted in very few validated biomarkers," Dan Hayes told BioWorld Insight.

Scientists have reported "a detailed molecular circuit of how asthma is initiated and maintained," David Corry told BioWorld Today. "And that in turn helps us think in fundamentally different ways about new therapeutic approaches" to allergic asthma, which accounts for more than half of all asthma and affects nearly 5 percent of the population.

Cancer immunotherapy is currently the industry's knight in shining armor. Researchers have high hopes that harnessing the immune system will enable cancer treatment to finally offer patients durable remissions or even cures, rather than the short-term respite that current cancer drugs all too often provide.

Triple-negative breast cancer has the worst prognosis of any type of breast cancer, both because it is comprised of many different subtypes and because there are no targeted therapies for any of those subtypes.

Creating more dangerous strains of flu viruses for research purposes is a double-edged sword. Researchers have developed a novel biocontainment strategy for such viruses. It consists of adding a gene that makes them a target for destruction in the human lung, but not the lungs of ferrets.

In a Phase I trial, a vaccine made up of weakened immature malaria parasites provided high levels of immunity against malaria infection. Scientists reported the results in the Aug. 8, 2013, online issue of Science.