Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.

The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.

Researchers at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a new platform that combines 3D bioprinting, advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to better monitor how cancer responds to treatment. The technology could help researchers identify promising cancer therapies more rapidly and provide a way to test treatments on a patient's own tumor cells, helping guide more personalized treatment decisions.

For the 18 million people living with rheumatoid arthritis, disease management currently means a lifetime of injections - a reality that new research from Tsinghua University may soon begin to change. Current first-line biologics targeting tumor necrosis factor (TNF) - including adalimumab (Humira), long among the world’s best-selling drugs - require injections every two weeks, potentially for decades. Prolonged use drives anti-drug antibody (ADA) formation in many patients, eroding therapeutic benefit and causing secondary treatment failure.

New antibiotic candidates for drug-resistant bacteria may reside inside prions, mis-folded protein in the brain best known for rare and fatal degenerative brain diseases. Prion and prion-like proteins may hide short peptides, named “prionins,” that can kill bacteria, suggesting proteins best known for their role in neurodegeneration may contain molecular features linked to immune defense, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

For some people, cancer immunotherapies are life-changing. These treatments can turn the body’s own immune system against a tumor, either eliminating it or shrinking it enough to make surgery possible. But these therapies don’t work for everyone, can gradually stop working or can come with a host of side effects, including severe inflammation.

Central nervous system arteriovenous malformations, or CNS-AVMs, are abnormal tangles of blood vessels in the brain or spinal cord. They form direct high-flow connections between arteries and veins and can cause hemorrhagic stroke, seizures, headache, neurological deficits, or progressive disability, especially in children and young adults. Current treatments, including microsurgery, embolization, and stereotactic radiosurgery, can be effective but are invasive and may carry substantial risks for patients with complex lesions.

Researchers at the University of Houston’s College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpected simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine - getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.