1 year results from landmark HORIZONS AMI trial: Use of bivalirudin is shown to improve survival compared to standard drug therapy for heart attack patients following angioplasty

In an Australian first, scientists at Sydney's Centenary Institute have mapped the anatomy of a membrane protein. This exciting discovery has the potential to turn the way we discover new drugs on its head and reduce the development time for new treatments.

A JDRF collaboration between Johns Hopkins researchers and Genentech has shown that a drug for the treatment of diabetic eye disease has performed better in clinical trials than the current standard treatment using laser surgery.

Penn experts will present research findings that could come to define new standards of cardiovascular diagnostics and care at this weekend’s conference of the American College of Cardiology, the foremost professional society representing heart specialists throughout the world.

Adverse drug events are more common in older adults because they are prescribed more drugs and are effected differently by these drugs than their younger counterparts.

Investigators at the University of Rochester Medical Center have uncovered a promising drug therapy that offers a ray of hope for children with Batten disease – a rare neurodegenerative disease that strikes seemingly healthy kids, progressively robs them of their abilities to see, reason and move, and ultimately kills them in their young twenties.

Providing HIV combination antiretroviral drug therapy is key to saving the lives of African children infected with the disease.

While some targeted therapies – drugs developed to attack specific molecules in the critical chemical pathways occurring within cancer cells – work well by themselves, increasingly researchers are finding that they work better when teamed with other targeted and conventional therapies.

In an 18-year-study on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Mayo Clinic researchers found that treatment with prescription stimulants is associated with improved long-term academic success of children with ADHD. The Mayo Clinic results are the first population-based data to show stimulant drug therapy helps improve long-term school outcomes.

The number of serious adverse drug events reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more than doubled between 1998 and 2005, as did deaths associated with adverse drug events, according to a report in the September 10 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Results of a study by investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital provide strong evidence for why the targeted therapy drug imatinib (Gleevec™), which has revolutionized the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), is often unable to prevent relapse of a particularly aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

The production of utrophin slows in fetal muscles soon after birth, after which dystrophin takes over as the primary muscle-associated protein. How this normal utrophin silencing occurs has been a mystery, until now.