Recent News

By Category: Research

Immunotherapy Is Beginning To Have A Major Impact For Patients With Cancer And Infectious Diseases

(MedicalNewsToday) The idea of fighting infections and even cancers by inducing protective immune responses may now be a step closer to clinical practice. Researchers have removed a major obstacle to widespread use of so-called adoptive transfer therapy, in which a patient receives “killer” immune cells targeting a disease agent. Existing technologies can easily provide T  Read More »

New studies fine-tune H7N9 severity estimates

(CIDRAP) A lull in the number of H7N9 cases in China has given experts a chance to sift the data to fine-tune the clinical picture of the disease, which now suggests that it is less serious than earlier assessments, with more mild infections than previously thought. Some of the obstacles to gauging H7N9’s true severity  Read More »

Antibiotic from the Sea is Effective Against Anthrax

(LaboratoryEquipment) A new potential drug from a marine microorganism is effective against anthrax and various other Gram-positive bacteria, as reported by American scientists in the journal Angewandte Chemie. A chlorinated analogue kills off Gram-negative bacteria. Anthrax is a dangerous infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis and transmitted by infected farm animals. For  Read More »

Is that bacteria dead yet?

(EurekAlert) Researchers at EPFL have built a matchbox-sized device that can test for the presence of bacteria in a couple of minutes, instead of up to several weeks. A nano-lever vibrates in the presence of bacterial activity, while a laser reads the vibration and translates it into an electrical signal that can be easily read—the  Read More »

Antibiotics: Change route of delivery to mitigate resistance

(EurekAlert) New research suggests that the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance correlates with oral ingestion of antibiotics, raising the possibility that other routes of administration could reduce the spread of resistance. The manuscript appears online ahead of print in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. “For more than 40 years, a few doses of penicillin  Read More »