An injection given during some asthma and COPD attacks is more effective than the current treatment of steroid tablets, reducing the need for further treatment by 30%.

The findings, published today in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, could be "game-changing" for millions of people with asthma and COPD around the world, scientists say.

With the rapid development of antibiotics in the 1930s, phage therapy - using viruses known as bacteriophages or phages to tackle bacterial infections - fell into oblivion. But as the current rise in antibiotic resistance is making it increasingly difficult to treat bacterial infections, phage therapy is once again sparking interest among physicians and scientists - although it remains complex in practice because of the great diversity and specificity of phages. Against this backdrop, scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Inserm, the Paris Public Hospital Network (AP-HP) and Université Paris Cité have developed a simple and effective new tool that recommends the best possible phage cocktail for a given patient.

The preclinical study, published in Cardiovascular Diabetology, found LXA4, which is known for its "calming agent" action in turning off the body’s inflammatory response and preventing chronic inflammation, could also serve as a potential new treatment for diabetes-induced heart disease.

Heart conditions like atherosclerosis, heart attacks and heart failure are the leading killers of people with diabetes, driving a growing global health crisis.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have found a molecule that can both help the intestines to heal after damage and suppress tumour growth in colorectal cancer. The discovery could lead to new treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer. The results are published in the journal Nature.

Many patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis do not respond to available treatments, highlighting the need to identify novel therapeutic strategies.

Malaria, particularly in its severe forms, remains a global health and economic burden. It causes the deaths of more than 600,000 people every year - most of them African children under five. In a new study, published in the journal Nature, researchers from EMBL Barcelona, the University of Texas, the University of Copenhagen, and The Scripps Research Institute have discovered human antibodies that can recognise and target some of the proteins that cause severe malaria. This breakthrough could pave the way for future vaccines or anti-malaria treatments.

Researchers at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion have developed a new chemical process to produce raw materials for the manufacture of polymers, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural compounds. In a paper about the process in Nature Chemistry, the researchers detail how they developed the new process and conducted a computational analysis to explain its mechanisms and key stages. The study was led by doctoral students Alexander Koronatov and Deepak Ranolia, and postdoctoral researcher Pavel Sakharov, under the guidance of Prof. Mark Gandelman.

A multitude of genes have been linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease. Specifically how those genes might influence the progression of neurodegeneration remains something of a black box though, in part because of the challenges of examining in molecular detail the brain of a living patient.

Using cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collected from living patients, a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has for the first time linked disease-related proteins and genes to identify specific cellular pathways responsible for Alzheimer's genesis and progression.