News by Subject Medicine & Health

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a safer and more efficient way to deliver a promising new method for treating cancer and liver disorders and for vaccination -- including a COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna Therapeutics that has advanced to clinical trials with humans.

Researchers have shown that a variation in the viral genome of Covid-19 improved its ability to infect human cells and helped it become the dominant strain circulating around the world today.

There's considerable controversy over whether "COVID toes"--red sores or lesions on the feet and hands in children and young adults--are truly caused by COVID-19. A new study published in the British Journal of Dermatology provides evidence in support of the link.

In a study done with mice and published earlier this month in the journal Nutrients, researchers found that a diet high in black raspberries reduced inflammation from contact hypersensitivity -- a condition that causes redness and inflammation in the skin.

Infecting volunteers with COVID-19 may provide valuable insights for future rounds of vaccine testing, but would require very strict controls and is unlikely to advance the current slate of vaccines in advanced development, argues a group of infectious disease experts. Though model development would be laborious, it could ultimately be advantageous, allowing researchers to answer a broader range of questions about both the virus and vaccines designed to prevent it during later rounds of testing.

In a Perspective for the New England Journal of Medicine, members of the National Institutes of Health's Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) Vaccines Working Group assess practical considerations and prerequisites for using controlled human infection models (CHIMs), which can be used for human challenge studies, to support SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.

Research from the University of Bath in the UK suggests the best medicine-related support comes from hospital pharmacists, yet few discharged patients use helplines set up for this purpose.