Antibiotic resistance has quietly become one of the greatest threats to global healthcare. Each year, drug-resistant bacteria claim lives by rendering once-reliable antibiotics ineffective, turning routine surgeries, cancer treatments, and even common infections into potentially life-threatening events.

Scientists around the world are racing to find new ways to stay ahead of these evolving pathogens. The answer may not lie in discovering an entirely new antibiotic, but in reinventing the chemistry behind the ones we already have.

In a promising development for cancer treatment, a collaborative research team has overcome two issues that have prevented photo thermal therapy, a much less invasive treatment option than surgery and/or radiation, from becoming more common.

Photothermal therapy uses near-infrared laser light to selectively heat and destroy cancer cells. However, when the immune system senses the nanoparticles carrying therapeutic agents it often begins clearing them before they can reach the tumors.

Penn Engineers have developed PeptiVerse, an AI-powered platform that predicts key chemical and biological properties of peptides, the strings of amino acids whose medical potential has been demonstrated by the success of GLP-1 drugs, the widely used weight-loss treatments.

In Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they trained PeptiVerse using a wide range of data sets, allowing it to predict properties that can help determine whether a peptide is worth pursuing as a potential drug,

Like all living cells, bacteria need vitamins to survive and cause infection. Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters - called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters - to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. Block these transporters, and the bacteria run out of essential nutrients and die. What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them.

A research team from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) reports that a groundbreaking pathway-targeted therapy could be an effective treatment for certain melanoma patients and fill an unmet clinical need for patients with advanced disease.

Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of dermatology at the U, evaluated an investigative compound of the drug daraxonrasib in NRAS-driven melanoma.

Researchers from two Technion faculties have jointly developed a new compound and demonstrated its effectiveness against aggressive tumor cells.

A study published in Oncogene presents an innovative strategy for the particularly complex medical challenge of destroying aggressive, treatment-resistant tumors.

The targeted RAS inhibitor therapy daraxonrasib demonstrated the potential to improve patient outcomes over current standard treatments for patients with RAS-mutant pancreatic cancer, according to results of a Phase 1/2 trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was led by David Hong, M.D., deputy chair of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics.