Medical

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a boron carrier for use in targeted radiation treatment for cancerous tumours. The carrier is based on a common blood plasma protein, meaning it can be tailored to individual patients thus lessening the chances of blood contamination. Targeted radiation-based therapies for treating cancerous tumours such as 'boron neutron capture therapy' (BNCT), rely on the efficient and effective delive...

  Based on the largest resource of its kind, members of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard report scientific findings from data on the exome sequences (protein-coding portions of the genome) from 60,706 people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

A Purdue-based startup is developing molecular modelling simulation software that could help pharmaceutical companies more accurately predict the crystal structure of a drug once produced, helping maintain a consistent drug quality and save costs when developing new drugs. Lyudmila Slipchenko, associate professor in Purdue's Department of Chemistry, and Pradeep Kumar Gurunathan, a graduate student in chemistry, co-founded the company Simplex...

Nowadays, characterisation of biological processes necessitates investigation at the single molecule level, and hence sensitive imaging techniques. To achieve this, a European team used nanoparticles as imaging probes for receptors in the brain. In the nervous system, neurons communicate with each other or with other cell types through specialised structures known as synapses.

Emma Segelov, Marketing Manager for MK Electric (a Honeywell company), explains the growing importance of specifying anti-bacterial devices in hospitals to prevent the growing risk of infection.

Computers can be trained to be more accurate than pathologists in assessing slides of lung cancer tissues, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers found that a machine-learning approach to identifying critical disease-related features accurately differentiated between two types of lung cancers and predicted patient survival times better than the standard approach of pathologists clas...

A technology harnesses imperfections that typically compromise MRI exams to create images resolved enough to enable consistent diagnoses across populations for the first time. These are findings of a study led by NYU Langone Medical Center and published in Nature Communications. Since its emergence in the 1970s, MRI has given physicians a better look inside tissues, helping to diagnose maladies from brain tumors to internal bleeding to ...

A team of researchers led by McGill University postdoctoral fellow Farnood Gholami, supervised by Jozsef Kövecses from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Centre for Intelligent Machines, collaborated with Daria Trojan, a physiatrist in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery working at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, to test whether the Kinect could detect the differences in gait of MS patients compared to he...

Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just achieved a breakthrough in cancer research. They have developed nanorobotic agents capable of navigating through the bloodstream to administer a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumours. This way of injecting medication ensures the optimal targeting of a tumour and avoids jeopardising the ...

A non-invasive way to track the progression of Parkinson's disease could help evaluate experimental treatments to slow or stop the disease's progression. University of Florida researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal areas where Parkinson's disease and related conditions cause progressive decline in brain activity. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published in the journal Neurology...