A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine is coming closer to delivering on the promise of personalized breast cancer therapy with a strategy to predict the most likely response of a cancer to a specific less toxic treatment regimen.

In this study published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, the scientists developed and validated in clinical trials a multiparameter molecular classifier test to predict with a high degree of confidence which patients with HER2-positive (HER2+) breast cancer would be candidates for anti-HER2 therapy alone without the need for chemotherapy.

Researchers at UCLA Health and Harvard have identified 10 pesticides that significantly damaged neurons implicated in the development of Parkinson’s disease, providing new clues about environmental toxins' role in the disease.

While environmental factors such as pesticide exposure have long been linked to Parkinson's, it has been harder to pinpoint which pesticides may raise risk for the neurodegenerative disorder.

Irregularities in the body's genetic coding to make proteins are linked to cancerous tumors. But most genetic material contains elements whose function isn’t clear.

Could abnormalities in non-coding material also impact a person’s health, or even be linked to cancers as well?

Experts from Newcastle University found the nervous system of people with post-COVID fatigue was underactive in three key areas. Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of long COVID.

The breakthrough could lead to better treatment and tests to identify the condition and the team are already progressing the work having just started a trial.

Vitamin D intake could reduce cancer mortality in the population by twelve percent - provided the vitamin is taken daily. This was the result of an evaluation of 14 studies of the highest quality conducted at the German Cancer Research Center with a total of almost 105,000 participants.

Vitamin D deficiency is widespread worldwide and is particularly common among cancer patients.

Strategies to treat pain without triggering dangerous side effects such as euphoria and addiction have proven elusive. For decades, scientists have attempted to develop drugs that selectively activate one type of opioid receptor to treat pain while not activating another type of opioid receptor linked to addiction. Unfortunately, those compounds can cause a different unwanted effect: hallucinations.

A new Nature Immunology study led by University of Pittsburgh and National Institutes of Health researchers sheds light on how a rare type of helper T cell, called Th9, can drive allergic disease, suggesting new precision medicine approaches to treating allergies in patients with high levels of Th9.