A significant breakthrough has been made by scientists at The University of Manchester towards developing an effective treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Researchers at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology have detailed how an enzyme in the brain interacts with an exciting drug-like lead compound for Huntington's Disease to inhibit its activity.

Research for diabetes is far more focused on drug therapies than preventive measures, and tends to exclude children and older people who have much to gain from better disease management, according to a Duke Medicine study. By analyzing nearly 2,500 diabetes-related trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov from 2007-10, the authors provide a broad overview of the research landscape for diabetes.

In a report that appears online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the researchers have shown that a subset of breast cancer patients who have tumors overexpressing a protein called the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2 positive) may benefit from a combination of targeted treatments that zero in on the breast cancer cells themselves.

It's generally thought that anticancer chemotherapies work like antibiotics do, by directly killing off what's harmful. But new research published online on April 4 in the Cell Press journal Immunity shows that effective chemotherapies actually work by mobilizing the body's own immune cells to fight cancer. Researchers found that chemo-treated dying tumors secrete a factor that attracts certain immune cells, which then ingest tumor proteins and present them on their surfaces as alert signals that an invader is present.

The creation of new blood vessels in the body, called "angiogenesis," is usually discussed in connection with healing wounds and tumors. But it's also an ongoing process in the female reproductive tract, where the growth and breaking of blood vessels is a normal part of the menstrual cycle. But abnormal growth of blood vessels can have painful consequences and resultant pathologies.

A multicenter team of researchers, including scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed biodegradable nanoparticles that are capable of delivering inflammation-resolving drugs to sites of tissue injury.

A study led by researchers at the University of North Carolina indicates that a newly approved blood thinner that blocks a key component of the human blood clotting system may increase the risk and severity of certain viral infections, including flu and myocarditis, a viral infection of the heart and a significant cause of sudden death in children and young adults.