Cancer cells have a voracious appetite for sugar - using it to fuel their rapid growth. This is why many scientists have tried to develop drugs that block cancer cells’ metabolism by cutting off their sugar supply.

Now a team led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin report in the journal Nature Chemical Biology that they have found a completely different approach. Instead of starving cancer cells, they trick them into consuming even more sugar than usual.

A protein that can dial down oxidative stress in cells helps some cancers resist treatment with a widely used class of drugs called BTK inhibitors, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine. The discovery points to a possible solution to the problem of BTK inhibitor treatment resistance.

BTK inhibitors reduce the activity of the enzyme BTK (Bruton’s Tyrosine Kinase), which has a central role in immune cells called B cells.

Viagra was originally developed to treat high blood pressure and chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart, but over the past three decades it has become the world’s best-known therapy for erectile dysfunction. In the future, this blockbuster drug may find yet another use. In a study published recently in Cancer Research, scientists in the lab of Prof. Ayelet Erez at the Weizmann Institute of Science found that sildenafil, Viagra’s active ingredient, may restrict cancer metastasis through a newly discovered biological mechanism.

Abbott (NYSE: ABT) today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Google Health to redefine how people understand and manage their health. By combining glucose insights from Abbott's Lingo biowearable with Google's expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and consumer technology, the multi-year collaboration makes personalized metabolic insights more actionable, helping people take a more proactive approach to their health.

An international research team led by the Medical University of Vienna has investigated a new peptide derived from cone snail venom which significantly reduced inflammation-induced pain in an animal model. Crucially, its effect takes hold immediately after subcutaneous injection, whereas previously known cone snail peptides must be administered directly into the cerebrospinal fluid.

More than half of U.S. adults ages 30 to 79 - about 87.5 million people - are now recommended for statins to prevent cardiovascular disease under newly updated clinical guidelines, according to a study by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers published in JAMA.

The new recommendations significantly change how doctors assess cardiovascular risk by looking beyond the next 10 years to a person’s risk over several decades.

Many countries are using too many powerful and inappropriate antibiotics, fuelling antibiotic resistance concerns, while millions lack access to the specific drugs they need. That is according to a major international study of antibiotic use published in The Lancet Public Health.

Research led by City St George's, University of London and University of Oxford developed the first global framework that estimates how many and which type of antibiotics each country needs to treat their infections.

Use of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity are associated with an increased risk of hair loss (alopecia) in adults with type 2 diabetes, finds a study published by The BMJ.

Although the absolute risk is low, awareness of this potential effect may help to inform shared treatment decisions, say the researchers.

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have uncovered the first high-resolution structure of NBCn2, a brain protein linked to epilepsy, autism spectrum disorder, and other neurological conditions, and developed the first compounds capable of inhibiting its activity. The findings provide a new framework for studying how altered brain signaling contributes to disease and may help advance future therapeutic research.

Antibiotic resistance has quietly become one of the greatest threats to global healthcare. Each year, drug-resistant bacteria claim lives by rendering once-reliable antibiotics ineffective, turning routine surgeries, cancer treatments, and even common infections into potentially life-threatening events.

Scientists around the world are racing to find new ways to stay ahead of these evolving pathogens. The answer may not lie in discovering an entirely new antibiotic, but in reinventing the chemistry behind the ones we already have.

In a promising development for cancer treatment, a collaborative research team has overcome two issues that have prevented photo thermal therapy, a much less invasive treatment option than surgery and/or radiation, from becoming more common.

Photothermal therapy uses near-infrared laser light to selectively heat and destroy cancer cells. However, when the immune system senses the nanoparticles carrying therapeutic agents it often begins clearing them before they can reach the tumors.

Penn Engineers have developed PeptiVerse, an AI-powered platform that predicts key chemical and biological properties of peptides, the strings of amino acids whose medical potential has been demonstrated by the success of GLP-1 drugs, the widely used weight-loss treatments.

In Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they trained PeptiVerse using a wide range of data sets, allowing it to predict properties that can help determine whether a peptide is worth pursuing as a potential drug,

Like all living cells, bacteria need vitamins to survive and cause infection. Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters - called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters - to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. Block these transporters, and the bacteria run out of essential nutrients and die. What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them.

A research team from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) reports that a groundbreaking pathway-targeted therapy could be an effective treatment for certain melanoma patients and fill an unmet clinical need for patients with advanced disease.

Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of dermatology at the U, evaluated an investigative compound of the drug daraxonrasib in NRAS-driven melanoma.

Researchers from two Technion faculties have jointly developed a new compound and demonstrated its effectiveness against aggressive tumor cells.

A study published in Oncogene presents an innovative strategy for the particularly complex medical challenge of destroying aggressive, treatment-resistant tumors.

The targeted RAS inhibitor therapy daraxonrasib demonstrated the potential to improve patient outcomes over current standard treatments for patients with RAS-mutant pancreatic cancer, according to results of a Phase 1/2 trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was led by David Hong, M.D., deputy chair of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics.

A research team has developed OPTAR, a computational tool for discovering novel therapeutic targets from large-scale omics data. Designed to identify proteins without known drugs or prior disease links, OPTAR integrates literature mining, protein-protein interaction-based disease inference, and binding-pocket assessment. Using hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as a test case, the tool prioritized UBE2J1, KDELR3, and VTI1A as functional targets, offering a practical route from complex omics datasets to first-in-class drug discovery.

A research team from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) reports that a groundbreaking pathway-targeted therapy could be an effective treatment for certain melanoma patients and fill an unmet clinical need for patients with advanced disease.

Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of dermatology at the U, evaluated an investigative compound of the drug daraxonrasib in NRAS-driven melanoma.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have reported results from a large international clinical trial showing that semaglutide, a medication in the GLP-1 class of drugs widely used to treat diabetes and obesity, may help reduce liver scarring in patients with advanced fatty liver disease, including those with early-stage cirrhosis.

The study results, published in the online edition of The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, address a major unmet need for people with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH),

Modern medicine increasingly relies on targeted drug delivery, a process during which therapeutic molecules are transported directly to specific organs or even certain cell types. To do this, drugs are often packaged inside biocompatible particles (nanoparticles), commonly composed of different fat molecules.

The efficiency of the delivery process is determined by many characteristics of the particles.