News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Two recent studies led by researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School add new evidence to the impact of how drug price increases affect US patients and the overall cost of health care.

An algorithm designed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology Department and St. Petersburg State University in Russia could help scientists identify unknown molecules. The algorithm, called MolDiscovery, uses mass spectrometry data from molecules to predict the identity of unknown substances, telling scientists early in their research whether they have stumbled on something new or merely rediscovered something already known. This development could save time and money in the search for new naturally occurring products that could be used in medicine.

UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers discovered that the enzyme RNA polymerase II recognizes and transcribes artificially added base pairs in genetic code, a new insight that could help advance the development of new vaccines and medicines.

By cleverly combining complementary sequencing techniques, researchers of Ghent University, together with Baylor College of Medicine and the world's leading sequencing company, Illumina, have deepened our understanding of the function of known RNA molecules and discovered thousands of new RNAs. A better understanding of our transcriptome is essential to better understand disease processes and uncover novel genes that may serve as therapeutic targets or biomarkers.

Despite near unanimous objection from its advisory panel, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted aducanumab approval to treat Alzheimer's disease on June 7, 2021. In a commentary published in Annals of Internal Medicine, a member and former Chair of the advisory panel and an aducanumab site investigator explain why this unprecedented "accelerated approval" is problematic for clinical research and patient care.

A study performed by researchers at the Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC) from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in collaboration with Stony Brook University (USA) proposes a new strategy for the development of new drugs based on the inhibition of tyrosine kinase enzymes, molecules that activate and trigger many cellular processes. The results have been published in the Chemistry - A European Journal.

Adding an immune checkpoint inhibitor to anti-HER2 treatment in breast cancer does not improve pathological complete response (pCR), according to the primary analysis of the IMpassion050 trial presented today during the ESMO Virtual Plenary. The phase III trial is the first to report data comparing a neoadjuvant anti-HER2 based regimen with or without the anti-PD-L1 antibody atezolizumab in patients with high-risk, HER2-positive early breast cancer.

In our study, we constructed a detecting platform based on TpTta-COF nanosheets and fluorescent probe. The TpTta-COF nanosheets can adsorb single-stranded DNA (ss-DNA) probes and quench the fluorescence of ss-DNA. The method enables to capture miR-205 sensitively in aqueous solution with a detection limit of 4.78 nM in the range 0-500 nM and R2 = 0.989, and the method offers great specificity in that it can distinguish the target miRNA from mismatch non-target miRNAs.