A new way to spot melanoma cells circulating in the blood has the potential to significantly improve the monitoring of cancer patients and guide future treatment.

Edith Cowan University's Melanoma Research Group, in collaboration with Harvard Medical School and clinicians at Western Australian hospitals, has pioneered a new technique to detect circulating tumour cells (CTCs) that could provide a new avenue for cancer diagnosis and therapies.

Hotter and drier El Niño events are having an alarming effect on biodiversity in the Amazon Rainforest and further add to a disturbing global insect collapse, scientists show.

A new study focusing on the humble, but ecologically key, dung beetle has revealed for the first time that intense droughts and wildfires during the last El Niño climate phenomenon, combined with human disturbance, led to beetle numbers falling by more than half - with effects lasting for at least two years.

Too many patients with cancers like multiple myeloma relapse after treatment. This grim reality motivated researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah (U of U) to try to improve the depth and durability of treatment response in multiple myeloma through a new cancer cell targeting mechanism. Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer and develops in the bone marrow. Approximately 30,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, and almost all patients eventually succumb to their disease.

Scientists have identified a key molecule involved in the development of cerebral malaria, a deadly form of the tropical disease. The study identifies a potential drug target and way forward toward alleviating this condition for which few targeted treatments are available.

Hospitals, doctors and Medicare Advantage insurance plans that care for some of the most vulnerable patients are not reimbursed fairly by Medicare, according to recent findings in JAMA.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean on Feb. 7, it gathered water vapor data that provided information about the intensity of Tropical Cyclone Damien.

While sitting in the dentist's office, Hollings Cancer Center researcher Matthew Carpenter, Ph.D., of the Medical University of South Carolina, had a bright idea.

As he received his goody bag with dental hygiene products, he wondered why not conduct a study and have primary care providers do the same thing for their patients who use tobacco. The bags would contain educational material, free lozenges and tobacco cessation medications to encourage people to stop smoking.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Colorado State University has used computational chemistry, biochemistry and virology to uncover new information on how viruses such as West Nile, dengue and Zika replicate. Based on their research, the team said these viruses appear to cripple their own genome replication machinery.

CSU researchers described the results as "surprising," and said the findings have implications for future vaccine and antiviral drug development.

A research group led by Professor NISHIMURA Noriyuki (Graduate School of Health Sciences, Kobe University) has developed a new method to monitor the residual disease after treatment in high-risk neuroblastoma patients. The method could be utilized to evaluate treatment response and facilitate early diagnosis of tumor relapse/regrowth.

Mice born blind have shown significant improvement in vision after undergoing a new gene therapy developed by a team of Japanese scientists.

The results were published on January 24th in Nature Communications.