Month: April 2025

Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria, the ‘powerhouses’ of our cells, allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth. Scientists have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate — a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars — into our mitochondria.

A new study by biomedical engineers and neuroscientists shows that the brain’s visual regions play an active role in making sense of information.

A new smart insole system that monitors how people walk in real time could help users improve posture and provide early warnings for conditions from plantar fasciitis to Parkinson’s disease.

A team of researchers has identified a promising new approach that may one day help to restore vision in people affected by macular degeneration and other retinal disorders.

A new study has found important clues about the roles age, sex, hormonal changes and genetics play in how certain biomarkers for dementia are expressed in the blood, according to a new study.

Bacteria naturally present in the human intestine (known as the gut microbiota) can transform cholesterol-derived bile acids into powerful metabolites that strengthen anti-cancer immunity by blocking androgen signaling, according to a preclinical study.

Researchers have developed and tested an intervention called Counter-Attitudinal Advocacy and compared it to to the well-established Personalized Normative Feedback (PNF) to evaluate their effectiveness in decreasing drinks per week, peak blood alcohol concentration and alcohol-related consequences relative to a control group.

A multi-institutional team developed a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell-based strategy for specifically targeting AML cells in patients who relapsed following other treatments. The team identified a monoclonal antibody called KG2032 that reacts with a certain variant of the HLA-DRB1 molecule. KG2032 CAR T cells displayed strong anti-AML effects in a mouse model, and CAR natural killer cells showed similar results. Clinical trials are currently being planned.

A new, error-corrected method for detecting cancer from blood samples is much more sensitive and accurate than prior methods and may be useful for monitoring disease status in patients following treatment, according to a new study. The method, based on whole-genome sequencing of DNA, also represents an important step toward the goal of routine blood test-based screening for early cancer detection.

FDA has cleared an investigational new drug (IND) application to study switchable chimeric antigen receptor T cell (sCAR-T) therapy (CLBR001 + SWI019) in patients with autoimmune conditions. Patient recruitment for the phase 1 trial will begin soon (NCT06913608). The phase 1 clinical trial will evaluate the safety and efficacy of CLBR001 + SWI019 in patients with myositis, systemic sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, with the potential to expand to other indications in the future.