The road from disease research to disease cure isn't usually a smooth one. One role which bridges the laboratory and the clinic is that of the "clinician-scientist" – a doctor who understands disease both in the patient and in the Petri dish.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteer to take part in medical research studies, from simple health surveys to detailed analyses of their DNA or tests of experimental medicines.

The human body consists of billions of cells, each one doing a specific job but working together with others to carry out specific tasks. An understanding of how cells, tissues and organs function in health, and what happens to them in disease, is critical to our understanding of heart attacks, hypertension and anxiety, to name a few. Research does not get much more fundamental than this…

Five consecutive years of flat funding the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is deterring promising young researchers and threatening the future of Americans’ health, a group of seven preeminent academic research institutions warned today.

The Swedish government’s one-man study of medical research in this Nordic nation concludes that Sweden continues to fall behind its neighbors – and that Finland and Denmark are having greater international successes in the field.

The Translational Medicine Research Collaboration (TMRC) - the unique venture bringing together one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies with Scotland's finest medical research centres - today announced the second round of research projects to be funded through the initiative.

Meningococcal disease can strike with frightening speed. Its victims can present with symptoms in the morning and be dead by nightfall.

Scientists say they have created the world's first cloned embryo from a monkey, in work that could spur cloning of human cells for use in medical research.

A high-fat diet is not just bad for your heart, it can also throw off your body clock, setting off a chain reaction that inteferes with many metabolic functions, a study said.

A drug that boosts levels of the brain's own "bliss" chemical can help reverse symptoms of depression in rats, US and Italian researchers reported.

Could losing or gaining weight be as simple as flicking a switch in the body? Researchers from St Vincent's Hospital say it might be, finding that manipulating a molecule leads to dramatic weight loss or weight gain - without any apparent side effects.

Researchers have largely decoded cat's DNA, a step that may aid the search for treatments for both feline and human diseases.