Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab - and that's been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines run dry, the soil beneath our feet has a vast hidden reservoir of untapped lifesaving compounds.

Now, researchers have developed a way to access this microbial goldmine.

For decades, amino acids have been added to medical formulations like insulin as stabilizers: these small molecules keep proteins (i.e. larger particles) from interacting in undesirable ways. And for decades, scientists have known that this works - but not why.

Now, an international team of scientists, led by the Supramolecular Nano-Materials and Interfaces Laboratory in EPFL's School of Engineering,

Altuna Akalin and his team at the Max Delbrück Center have developed a new tool to more precisely guide cancer treatment. Described in a paper published in Nature Communications, the tool, called Flexynesis, uses deep neural networks and evaluates multi modal data.

Nearly 50 new cancer therapies are approved every year. This is good news.

Neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington’s disease are characterized by the progressive loss of neurons. The resulting debilitating symptoms, such as loss of memory and cognition, and motor impairment, can significantly degrade patients' quality of life, confining them to round-the-clock care. While currently used drugs help alleviate symptoms, curative treatments are lacking, thus underscoring the need for novel therapeutic strategies.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS), Imperial College London and the University of Cologne have discovered that microbes associated with tumours produce a molecule, which can control cancer progression and boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

Most people are familiar with the microbes on our skin or in our gut, but recent discoveries have revealed that tumours also host unique communities of bacteria.

In a move that could reshape drug discovery, researchers at Harvard Medical School have designed an artificial intelligence model capable of identifying treatments that reverse disease states in cells.

Unlike traditional approaches that typically test one protein target or drug at a time in hopes of identifying an effective treatment, the new model, called PDGrapher and available for free,

When it comes to their survival, cancer cells have a host of backup plans.

This is especially true of the nutrients that cancers use to grow and spread. In addition to relying on sugars like glucose to power their proliferation, some cancer cells also use ketones - metabolites produced from fats when the body is fasting or on a low carb diet - as an alternate fuel source.