News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Since 2013, gifts and payments to doctors by pharmaceutical and medical device companies have been publicly reported. Some medical centers, employers, and states have banned or restricted detailing visits, physician payments or gifts. In order to better understand the effects of these changes, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and the American Board of Internal Medicine conducted a national survey of internal medicine doctors.

Immunotherapy has been a major breakthrough in oncology -- but little is known about its safety for HIV-positive cancer patients. A study to be presented at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich has now provided data to suggest that treatment with PD-1/PD-L-1 immune checkpoint inhibitors, which target the very system affected by the HIV virus, is feasible in this patient population for whom cancer is currently one of the principal cause of mortality.

Chemotherapy is known to have a negative impact on the reproductive potential of young breast cancer patients. Its effects on women's post-treatment fertility, however, are still poorly understood. A study to be presented at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich, has confirmed that natural pregnancies are possible after chemotherapy but that survivors' desire to have children decreases greatly after treatment, calling into question the need for systematic recourse to fertility preservation measures.

Men and women may need to be treated differently -- at least when it comes to some types of cancer. In an analysis to be presented at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich, data was pooled from four UK randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) of first line chemotherapy in oesophagogastric (OG) cancer, finding significant differences in a number of important side-effects experienced by male and female patients.

MIT researchers have developed a cryptographic system that could help neural networks identify promising drug candidates in massive pharmacological datasets, while keeping the data private. Secure computation done at such a massive scale could enable broad pooling of sensitive pharmacological data for predictive drug discovery.

Scientists at Scripps Research have successfully tested a potential new smoking-cessation treatment in rodents.

The current study demonstrates a deleterious effect of midazolam administration prior to myocardial ischemia and reveals reduced circadian protein Period 2 (PER2) levels as the underlying mechanism. These findings highlight PER2 as a cardioprotective mechanism and suggest the PER2 enhancer nobiletin as preventative therapy for myocardial injury in the perioperative setting where midazolam pretreatment occurs frequently.