The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 jointly to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

An older medication originally approved to treat heart problems eases the symptoms of a very rare muscle disease that often leaves its sufferers stiff and in a good deal of pain, physicians and researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Scientists at USC have discovered a new type of drug for the treatment of ovarian cancer that works in a way that should not only decrease the number of doses that patients need to take, but also may make it effective for patients whose cancer has become drug-resistant.

A new type of antibiotic can effectively treat an antibiotic-resistant infection by disarming instead of killing the bacteria that cause it. Researchers report their findings in the October 2 issue of mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

Using biological markers - genetic characteristics that are associated with some patients with breast cancer - can increase the success rate of clinical trials for breast cancer drugs by almost 50 per cent, says new research from the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Results of the first-ever clinical drug trial for children with Progeria, a rare, fatal "rapid-aging" disease, demonstrate the efficacy of a farnesyltransferase inhibitor (FTI), a drug originally developed to treat cancer. The clinical trial results, completed only six years after scientists identified the cause of Progeria, included significant improvements in weight gain, bone structure and, most importantly, the cardiovascular system,

Ten leading biopharmaceutical companies have formed a non-profit organization to accelerate the development of new medicines. Abbott, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Genentech a member of the Roche Group, and Sanofi launched TransCelerate BioPharma Inc.