Although cancer treatment has come a long way in recent years, prognosis for patients with brain cancer still remains poor. For the most prevalent and aggressive form, glioblastoma, there is currently no curative treatment available. One of the major challenges to treating brain cancers is the inability of drugs to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB) …

Research shows that rare diseases (RD) impact the lives of estimated 300 million people worldwide. The good news is new advances in gene therapy seem to offer us a chance to treat rare diseases in a different way. The number of people living with a RD may seem small, but their treatment continues to be …

As SARS-CoV-2 spread across the globe in early 2020, researchers from around the world mounted an unprecedented collective campaign to elucidate the mechanisms of the novel virus and the disease it caused, COVID-19. While the majority of COVID-19 cases range from asymptomatic to moderate, a significant portion of patients suffer from severe disease and over …

Over the past two decades, advances in single cell technologies have given researchers unprecedented insight into the evolution of cancer. This, coupled with identification and characterization of oncogenes such as KRAS, EGFR, and BRAF, has led to the development of targeted molecular therapies meant to quell the destructive growth of specific cancers. However, this new …

People in tropical areas around the globe are battling an increasingly common parasitic disease – leishmaniasis. Leishmania protozoan parasites target host macrophages resulting in cutaneous, mucosal, and visceral ulcers, some of which can be extremely disfiguring and even fatal. Every year, up to a million or more people contract the disease and begin their battle …

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a silent epidemic, affecting nearly a quarter of the global population. The high prevalence is likely due to unhealthy Western dietary habits, rising obesity, and sedentary lifestyles, which are key risk factors associated with disease development. Because NAFLD is heavily influenced by lifestyle, patients who are diagnosed early are …

Despite huge progress in developing potent targeted therapies for cancer, drug resistance continues to be a major challenge in finding durable treatments. Whether the resistance exists before treatment (intrinsic) or is generated after therapy (acquired), these drug-tolerant cells are thought to be responsible for most cancer relapses. In a recent panel discussion, Dr. Stephen Baylin …

Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020 alone. One of the main challenges posed by the disease is that each individual cancer has a unique combination of genetic mutations, so no two cancers are the same. As such, the historical one-size-fits-all treatment approach doesn’t …

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the largest epidemics in the world today, having claimed over 36 million lives to date.1 In 2020 alone, 37.7 million people were estimated to be living with the virus and around 680,000 people died from HIV-related causes. While there is no cure for HIV, medicines have been …

Drug discovery can be a long and expensive process, so researchers are always looking for ways to optimize and enhance workflows. The advent of high-throughput screening (HTS) has enabled the evaluation of hundreds-of-thousands or even millions of molecules in an assay using automated technology, greatly expanding the chemical space explored in search of new drug …