The agency charged to protect patients from dangerous drug side effects needs to be far more vigilant when it comes to medications that affect blood pressure. Robert P. Blankfield, MD, MS, a clinical professor of family medicine, issues this call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in an editorial published recently in an online edition of the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics; the print version of the article is expected to appear this autumn.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reported a discovery that they hope will lead to the development of a powerful new way of treating an aggressive form of breast cancer. The breast cancer subtype in question is commonly called "HER2-positive"; it's a subset of the disease affecting about one patient in four, in which tumor cells overexpress a signaling protein called HER2.

Scientists have found a way to target elusive cells that suppress immune response, depleting them with peptides that spare other important cells and shrink tumors in preclinical experiments, according to a paper published online by Nature Medicine.

In the largest group of results to date, researchers from Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center and other institutions have shown in clinical trials that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) blocked autophagy in a host of aggressive cancers - glioblastoma, melanoma, lymphoma and myeloma, renal and colon cancers - and in some cases helped stabilize disease.

Clinicians treating patients suffering from Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) currently have no drugs specifically targeted to the MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a virus first detected in humans in 2012 that has since caused 614 laboratory-confirmed infections, including 181 that were fatal, according to the World Health Organization. The case count escalated sharply in the spring of this year, and the first cases in the United States were announced in early May.

There is increasing public pressure to report the results of all clinical trials to eliminate publication bias and improve public access. However, investigators using the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) to build a database of clinical trials involving chronic pain have encountered several challenges.

University of British Columbia scientists have uncovered an intricate chain reaction in the body's immune system and have used the knowledge to develop a new treatment against harmful viruses. Viral pandemics, such as the coronavirus that caused the deadly SARS outbreak in 2002, have caused hundreds of deaths in Canada, yet effective anti-viral drugs are rare.