Research News

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified stem cells in the human thymus for the first time. These cells represent a potential new target to understand immune diseases and cancer and how to boost the immune system.

Griffith University researchers are on the brink of a technological breakthrough in vaccine development with a possible new vaccine modality. Professor Bernd Rehm and Dr Shuxiong Chen from the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD) and Griffith’s Centre for Cell Factories and Biopolymers have succeeded in developing a new vaccine modality that is a stable particulate vaccine.

In a new study co-led by investigators at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, a global team of scientists conducted one of the largest genetic association studies on heart failure to date. Using genomic data from over 90,000 heart failure patients and more than a million controls, the team identified 39 genetic mutations associated with heart failure, 18 of which had not been reported previously.

Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem for human health and researchers worldwide are looking for new solutions. “We urgently need new antibiotics to combat bacteria that become increasingly resistant to most clinically used antibiotics,” says Dr. Markus Weingarth, a researcher from the Chemistry Department of Utrecht University.

Led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and many other organizations used advanced sequencing technologies to read out the full DNA sequence of the Y chromosome a  region of the genome that typically drives male reproductive development.

The Food and Drug Administration granted regular approval to pralsetinib (Gavreto, Genentech, Inc.) for adult patients with metastatic rearranged during transfection (RET) fusion-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as detected by an FDA-approved test.

Merck known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, announced that the pivotal Phase 3 KEYNOTE-756 trial investigating KEYTRUDA, Merck’s anti-PD-1 therapy, in combination with chemotherapy met one of its dual primary endpoints of pathological complete response (pCR) rate following the neoadjuvant part of the neoadjuvant/adjuvant study regimen in patients with high-risk, early-stage estrogen receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (ER+/HER2-) breast cancer.

People who contract COVID-19 but never develop symptoms the so-called super dodgers may have a genetic ace up their sleeve. They’re more than twice as likely as those who become symptomatic to carry a specific gene variation that helps them obliterate the virus, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco researchers. 

Additional heartbeats from cardiac chambers, so-called ventricular extrasystoles, may be associated with severe diseases. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) use machine learning for their non-invasive localization. This may facilitate and improve future diagnosis and therapy. The researchers use artificial neural networks trained with synthetic data from a realistic simulation model. They report in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.