Tests show success, but general use not yet approved

Viruses aren’t always the bad guys. Sure, they can cause colds, measles, AIDS and other miseries. But with some tinkering, these tiny organisms may become a new and better way to treat cancer.

In the last few years, scientists have been ge…

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute have discovered how tuberculosis (TB) bacteria hide and multiply in the human body and are working toward a treatment to block this mechanism of infection.

This discovery, published today in the …

The genome of a newly emerging superbug, commonly known as Steno, reveals an organism with a remarkable capacity for drug resistance

The genome of a newly-emerging superbug, commonly known as Steno, has just been sequenced. The results reveal an organism with a remarkable capacity for drug resist…

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have achieved promising results with a potential new weapon against respiratory syncytial virus, the most common cause of infant hospitalization in the United States.

In an effort to find an effective antiviral therapy for RSV, the scien…

Bacteria that cause the bubonic plague may be more virulent than their close relatives because of a single genetic mutation, according to research published in the May issue of the journal Microbiology.

“The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis needs calcium in order to grow at body temperature. Wh…

Study led by Cincinnati Children’s proposes further development to advance treatment

Combining a herpes virus genetically altered to express a drug-enhancing enzyme with a chemotherapy drug effectively and safely reduced the size of highly malignant human sarcoma grafted into mice. This new findi…

Austrian scientists identify the common mechanism underlying acute respiratory disease syndrome ARDS

The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 killed between 30 and 50 million people. In the infected patients, the ultimate cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This fatal condition…

Researchers at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Harvard Medical School, Atrius Health, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health have created and tested a set of computer programs that use electronic medical records to help clinicians detect contagious illness and automatically report them to pu…

Proteins in alligator blood could lead to new drugs that fight the super infections that plague humans, Louisiana researchers says.

Alligators often get banged up in battles over territory or food, but Mark Merchant of McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La., noticed they never seem to get …

One of the world’s deadliest diseases, caused by the Ebola virus, may finally be preventable thanks to US and Canadian researchers, who have successfully tested several Ebola vaccines in primates and are now looking to adapt them for human use.

Dr Anthony Sanchez, from the Centers for Disease C…