TITANIUM PROFESSIONALS

Many countries are using too many powerful and inappropriate antibiotics, fuelling antibiotic resistance concerns, while millions lack access to the specific drugs they need. That is according to a major international study of antibiotic use published in The Lancet Public Health.

Research led by City St George's, University of London and University of Oxford developed the first global framework that estimates how many and which type of antibiotics each country needs to treat their infections.

Use of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity are associated with an increased risk of hair loss (alopecia) in adults with type 2 diabetes, finds a study published by The BMJ.

Although the absolute risk is low, awareness of this potential effect may help to inform shared treatment decisions, say the researchers.

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have uncovered the first high-resolution structure of NBCn2, a brain protein linked to epilepsy, autism spectrum disorder, and other neurological conditions, and developed the first compounds capable of inhibiting its activity. The findings provide a new framework for studying how altered brain signaling contributes to disease and may help advance future therapeutic research.

Antibiotic resistance has quietly become one of the greatest threats to global healthcare. Each year, drug-resistant bacteria claim lives by rendering once-reliable antibiotics ineffective, turning routine surgeries, cancer treatments, and even common infections into potentially life-threatening events.

Scientists around the world are racing to find new ways to stay ahead of these evolving pathogens. The answer may not lie in discovering an entirely new antibiotic, but in reinventing the chemistry behind the ones we already have.

In a promising development for cancer treatment, a collaborative research team has overcome two issues that have prevented photo thermal therapy, a much less invasive treatment option than surgery and/or radiation, from becoming more common.

Photothermal therapy uses near-infrared laser light to selectively heat and destroy cancer cells. However, when the immune system senses the nanoparticles carrying therapeutic agents it often begins clearing them before they can reach the tumors.

Penn Engineers have developed PeptiVerse, an AI-powered platform that predicts key chemical and biological properties of peptides, the strings of amino acids whose medical potential has been demonstrated by the success of GLP-1 drugs, the widely used weight-loss treatments.

In Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they trained PeptiVerse using a wide range of data sets, allowing it to predict properties that can help determine whether a peptide is worth pursuing as a potential drug,

Like all living cells, bacteria need vitamins to survive and cause infection. Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters - called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters - to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. Block these transporters, and the bacteria run out of essential nutrients and die. What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them.

A research team from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) reports that a groundbreaking pathway-targeted therapy could be an effective treatment for certain melanoma patients and fill an unmet clinical need for patients with advanced disease.

Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of dermatology at the U, evaluated an investigative compound of the drug daraxonrasib in NRAS-driven melanoma.

Researchers from two Technion faculties have jointly developed a new compound and demonstrated its effectiveness against aggressive tumor cells.

A study published in Oncogene presents an innovative strategy for the particularly complex medical challenge of destroying aggressive, treatment-resistant tumors.

The targeted RAS inhibitor therapy daraxonrasib demonstrated the potential to improve patient outcomes over current standard treatments for patients with RAS-mutant pancreatic cancer, according to results of a Phase 1/2 trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was led by David Hong, M.D., deputy chair of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics.

A research team has developed OPTAR, a computational tool for discovering novel therapeutic targets from large-scale omics data. Designed to identify proteins without known drugs or prior disease links, OPTAR integrates literature mining, protein-protein interaction-based disease inference, and binding-pocket assessment. Using hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as a test case, the tool prioritized UBE2J1, KDELR3, and VTI1A as functional targets, offering a practical route from complex omics datasets to first-in-class drug discovery.

A research team from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) reports that a groundbreaking pathway-targeted therapy could be an effective treatment for certain melanoma patients and fill an unmet clinical need for patients with advanced disease.

Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of dermatology at the U, evaluated an investigative compound of the drug daraxonrasib in NRAS-driven melanoma.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have reported results from a large international clinical trial showing that semaglutide, a medication in the GLP-1 class of drugs widely used to treat diabetes and obesity, may help reduce liver scarring in patients with advanced fatty liver disease, including those with early-stage cirrhosis.

The study results, published in the online edition of The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, address a major unmet need for people with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH),

Modern medicine increasingly relies on targeted drug delivery, a process during which therapeutic molecules are transported directly to specific organs or even certain cell types. To do this, drugs are often packaged inside biocompatible particles (nanoparticles), commonly composed of different fat molecules.

The efficiency of the delivery process is determined by many characteristics of the particles.

In the United States, prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related disease and death in men.

About half of prostate cancer cases in patients of European ancestry have a gene rearrangement where the genes TMPRSS2 and ERG are fused together. This causes the ERG protein to be turned on, increasing the growth and migration of tumor cells.

Accumulation of DNA damage in the brain’s neurons may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. New research in FEBS Open Bio demonstrates the therapeutic potential of a drug that targets this process.

Using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, investigators found that treatment with KCL-286, a molecule that activates the retinoic acid receptor-β (RARβ), enhanced the repair of DNA damage in neurons.

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center were able to eradicate measurable residual disease (MRD) in B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients, a critical step in improving long-term survival outcomes, by treating with the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) inotuzumab ozogamicin.

Results from the Phase 2 study were published in Blood Cancer Journal. Among 37 patients treated, 70% achieved MRD negativity, including strong responses in both Philadelphia chromosome-positive and -negative disease.

A Monash University-led study has found that an unusual pairing of two commonly used antibiotics can kill and stop the spread of resistance in a highly drug-resistant bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause life-threatening bloodstream infections, pneumonia and meningitis.

Published in The Lancet Microbe, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) researchers used a validated laboratory infection system in which they were able to expose bacterial samples from infected patients to simulated antibiotic dosing regimens, as would actually occur in hospitalised patients.

Cholesterol-related heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, and while doctors have more tools than ever to treat it, many patients still can't achieve safe cholesterol levels, or can't tolerate the side effects of available medications. Now, researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine have uncovered a hidden biological pathway that explains why high-cholesterol diets steadily chip away at our body's ability to clear harmful low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol from the blood,

Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.

The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.