From Magic Bullets to Super T Cells: Immunotherapy encompasses multiple approaches, including harnessing or enhancing immune cells, hormones, and other weapons of the immune system to destroy tumor cells, as well as releasing the brakes on the immune response that tumors trigger. This new article takes the reader on a journey from the origins of us…

Liquid Biopsy is a new technology developed to advance cancer treatment. By using this innovative approach, physicians can enhance their ability to track cancer progression and to create highly individualized treatment plans for specific types of cancer. This complements existing approaches that use surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy to save live…

Transmission of the Zika virus throughout South and Central America has become a rising global public health threat. Spread mainly through infected mosquitoes, this virus poses substantial health risks because it can be passed from a pregnant women to her fetus, potentially causing severe birth defects. The newest issue of Breakthroughs in Bioscien…

In 1984, Charles Hull patented a process he called “stereolithography.” Now called three-dimensional (3D) printing, this technology has been used to manufacture rocket engines, custom-fit athletic shoes, and other 3D printers. The medical field also has reaped the benefits of 3D printing. Imaging data from computed tomography (CT) scans, ultrasound…

Throughout history, medical experts have dreamed of healing untreatable wounds, replacing a disfiguring scar with healthy skin, growing replacement lungs in the laboratory, and replacing a leg lost to injury or disease. Today, regenerative medicine has the potential to heal damaged tissues and organs, offering hope for those who have lost organ fun…

Just a generation ago, one out of five children in the United States died before reaching adulthood. Repeated epidemics swept through the world, killing as many as one-quarter of the population. Today, that frightening world no longer exists because of tremendous progress made in vaccine development and use. Vaccines save 2.5 million lives globally…

The ability to peer inside the body non-invasively has revolutionized modern medicine. With positron emission tomography (PET), physicians can not only look at the body’s internal structures, but can see the metabolic signs of disease.Par FASEB

Imagine if, before you ever took a drug, doctors could predict which drug would work best for you, because they already had information on how organs in your body were likely to respond. Organs-on-a-chip research is bringing that day closer. This emerging technology allows scientists to watch the cascade of events that takes place in organs in resp…

Imagine being able to treat and control debilitating neurological disorders with a flash of light! The emerging field of optogenetics represents a promising new approach to the eventual understanding and treatment of a number of devastating neurological and psychiatric disorders. A word first coined in 2006, optogenetics uses light-responsive prote…

Seventy percent of our drugs for pain and infection are either derived from or inspired by natural products of rainforests and other ecosystems. These medicinal compounds have dramatically improved quality of life and significantly extended the human lifespan. Through decades of basic research to identify new drugs and unravel the underlying mechan…

Despite a four-decade “war on cancer,” this year, 1.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with a form of this broad group of diseases, and a half million will die as a result. Beginning in the late 1930’s - early 1940’s, researchers were inspired by the success in treating infectious diseases with chemicals isolated from microorganisms and other na…

For more than three hundred years, scientists have observed, identified, and implicated individual microorganisms in specific diseases. More recently, with a convergence of scientific disciplines, an explosion in technical capabilities and revolutionary new ways of thinking, we are exploring the organisms with which we share our bodies. The effects…

CRISPR/CAS GENE EDITING has been called the biggest biotechnology discovery of the century, even though the 21st century is less than two decades old. Laboratories around the world have adopted this technique to edit genes simply, quickly, and inexpensively. It is already revealing new insights in basic science and may eventually be used to fight i…