Antibiotics already are ineffective against E. coli infection. In fact, they make things worse.

The irony of melanoma drug Zelboraf (vemurafenib, Roche AG and Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd.) is its side-effect profile. In 15 percent to 30 percent of patients treated with the drug, "you give a pill to treat a skin cancer and all of a sudden, another skin cancer appears," Antoni Ribas told BioWorld Today.

Cancer treatment is a field that has seen impressive advances in many areas, but no home run in terms of a cure. Many cancer researchers have pinned their hopes on cancer stem cells to change all that.

Most often in infectious disease, bacteria are the attackers.

Supposedly, academia's battle cry is "publish or perish." So why are so many clinical trials going unpublished?

In some sense, atherosclerosis starts because macrophages can't quit.

The anti-aging compound resveratrol is sometimes described as an attempt at delivering the benefits of caloric restriction in pill form.

Canadian biopharma Xenon Pharmaceuticals Inc. has nabbed a deal that could be worth more than $600 million. The collaboration with Roche Holdings AG member Genentech Inc. intends to discover and develop compounds and companion diagnostics for the treatment of pain.

The most obvious way to use stem cells is to differentiate them in a petri dish and transplant the resulting cells into tissues or organs that are damaged or diseased.

Cancer vaccines such as Dendreon Corp.'s Provenge (sipuleucel-T) harness dendritic cells to fight tumors. In fact, the discoverer of dendritic cells – Ralph Steinman, who in 2011 won the first posthumous Nobel Prize for his discovery – treated himself with therapies based on his own discovery after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.