Lifeboat Foundation

A widely available and inexpensive antidepressant drug may soon save lives from an altogether different kind of disease.

The growth of the most aggressive and deadly brain cancer, glioblastoma, was effectively suppressed in both ex vivo human tissue samples and in living mice by an FDA approved serotonin modulator currently used to treat major depression.

It’s not a cure, but it may offer some relief and constitute an effective part of a treatment regime for glioblastoma patients. Human clinical trials are the next step; patients are cautioned against self-medicating at this stage.

Plant-based diets have grown in popularity owing to multiple health and environmental benefits.

Here, the authors describe the evidence concerning plant-based dietary patterns and omnivorous diets with reduced consumption of animal-based food and increased consumption of plant-based foods and their associations with the most common urological cancers and benign urological conditions.

National Zoo And Conservation Biology Institute

With the help of 3D modeling technology, a team of veterinary experts successfully carried out a rare spinal surgery on an 11-month-old cheetah cub at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in August.

Summary: A recent study has mapped how molecules in food interact with gut bacteria, revealing why people respond differently to the same diets. By examining 150 dietary compounds, researchers found that these molecules can reshape gut microbiomes in some individuals, while having little effect in others.

This breakthrough could enable personalized nutrition strategies to better manage health risks. The findings offer a deeper understanding of the gut microbiome’s role in health and disease.

The 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicellular organisms.

MicroRNAs perform a multitude of tasks in complex organisms, from…

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun identified a class of tiny molecules that have a crucial role in controlling gene expression.

Continue reading “Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’” »

A novel peptide could provide a more targeted approach to Alzheimer’s treatment by inhibiting two key Tau protein regions.

Abstract Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine.

In the twentieth century, human life expectancy rose dramatically. Based on the past three decades of observed mortality in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations and in Hong Kong and the United States, Olshansky et al. propose that, without medical breakthroughs that slow aging, radical lifespan extension is implausible in this century.

A blood test that may be able to diagnose five types of cancer up to four years before other symptoms appear.

Researchers at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center of Max Delbrück Center and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin (ECRC) have found that different anatomical sections of the gastrointestinal tracts of mice carry different compositions of microbial communities. Moreover, the specific makeup of the microbiota can influence the type and abundance of immune cells in any particular region. The study, which was published in Gut Microbes, maps the complex spatial organization of immune cells and microbial communities, providing a tool for studying the interaction between gut microbes and inflammatory diseases.

Previous research has hinted at the existence of “hotspots” along the GI tract where specific immune cells and microbes might interact more intensely.

But no one had systematically investigated this across the entire gut, says Dr. Hendrik Bartolomaeus, in the Immune-Microbial Dynamics in Cardiorenal Disease lab of Dr. Nicola Wilck, and an author of the study.