In its last issue of the year, Science – one of the premier journals for peer-reviewed scientific research – published both what it considers to be the biggest breakthrough of the past year, and areas to watch for the next year. For 2012, one of those hopeful areas was "treating intellectual disability."
It sounds like a too-good-to-be-true idea that could come from New Age advocates of alternative cancer "treatments." But it is backed by top-notch science: A team of researchers discovered that short periods of fasting not only markedly boosted the effectiveness of chemotherapy on cancer cells, but simultaneously reduced its toxicity to normal cells.
In a session on "Bridging the Valley of Death: How Can Academia and Pharma Best Work Together?" at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening's annual meeting in San Diego this week, researchers from both academia and industry talked about how to get the most out of such collaborations.
Last week, the prostate cancer world was again abuzz with the possibility that men with advanced prostate cancer may soon have additional life-extending treatment options.
Resveratrol, a compound found in minuscule doses in foods including red wine and chocolate, is as close to ambrosia – the food of the ancient Greek Gods that gave them eternal youth – as anyone has come. It activates sirtuins and mimics the effects of caloric restriction, which is the only known way to reliably increase lifespan.
Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute have gained new insights into how T cells cross the blood-brain barrier by going with the flow – the blood flow, that is.
Only two weeks after disappointing news on its Alzheimer's disease candidate, Dimebon (latrepirdine), Medivation Inc. had better news to share. Data from its Phase III AFFIRM trial of prostate cancer drug MDV3100, which will be presented later this week, were highlighted in a press conference put on by the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2012 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium Tuesday.
Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco identified a protein that could be a drug target for treating Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects more than 10 million people worldwide.
BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are bad news to their carriers; the genes, which were the first cancer susceptibility genes to be identified, strongly raise the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers – in some cases, up to fivefold.
