Research News

A new group of antibiotics with a unique approach to attacking bacteria has been discovered, making it a promising clinical candidate in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

An artificial virus capable of attacking superbug infections resistant to antibiotics has been bioengineered by researchers at UCL, NPL, University of Cambridge, University of Exeter and King’s College London.

Homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in Louisiana, according to an analysis of birth and death records from 2016 and 2017. The study, appearing as a research letter in JAMA Pediatrics, was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health. The research team was led by Maeve E. Wallace, Ph.D., of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

Gilead is working closely with global health authorities to respond to the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak through the appropriate experimental use of our investigational compound remdesivir. Together with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the China CDC and National Medical Product Administration (NMPA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and along with individual researchers and clinicians, Gilead is focused on contributing our antiviral expertise and resources to help patients and communities fighting 2019-nCoV.

A Phase 1 clinical trial testing the safety and effectiveness of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) against malaria has begun enrolling healthy adult volunteers at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The trial, sponsored by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is the first to test mAb CIS43LS in humans. It aims to enroll up to 73 volunteers aged 18 through 50 years old who have never had malaria. After receiving mAb CIS43LS, most of the volunteers will be exposed to malaria parasite-carrying mosquitoes under carefully controlled conditions at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda to assess the ability of the mAb to confer protection from malaria infection.

Scientists from The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) in Melbourne have successfully grown the Wuhan coronavirus from a patient sample, which will provide expert international laboratories with crucial information to help combat the virus.

Tuberculosis kills. When it doesn’t, its effect stays for what is a lifetime. To make things worse, the current approach for treating TB consumes a lot of time. This puts pressure on TB control programmes. Here are some figures from World Health Organization’s website – 1.5 million people died of TB in 2018; an estimated 10 million fell ill with TB worldwide and alarmingly – among the eight countries that account for two-thirds of the TB cases, India has the most number of cases. 

Dietary supplements containing zinc and folic acid — marketed as a treatment for male infertility — do not appear to improve pregnancy rates, sperm counts or sperm function, according to a study conducted by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Scientists at Department of Biotechnology’s Thiruvananthapuram-based Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology have developed a new system that promises to improve the delivery of growth factors to help in healing wounds.

Breast cancer is a condition that affects far too many women across the globe. More than 55,000 people in the U.K. are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, and about 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will develop the disease in their lifetime.