Health

Cancer patients have new weapons on their side, provided by targeted drug therapy and, more recently, immune therapy. Now, the recent discovery of large numbers of noncoding RNA that are active in disease provides a new opportunity to both understand and fight cancer, according to Pier Paolo Pandolfi, professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Cancer Center and Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

A new Harvard center on health and happiness had its academic coming-out party Friday, hosting a daylong symposium that highlighted what science does and doesn’t say about the interaction of health and happiness, and identifying pathways where investigators should probe next.

A panel sponsored by the Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Union of Concerned Scientists brought food luminaries to talk about the need for a national food policy.

Studies have suggested that the Zika virus enters neural progenitor cells by grabbing onto a specific protein called AXL on the cell surface. Now, scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Novartis have shown that this is not the only route of infection. The scientists demonstrated that Zika infected neural progenitor cells even when the cells did not produce the AXL protein.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have used a colorful cell-labeling technique to track the development of the blood system and trace the lineage of an adult blood cell traveling through the vast networks of veins, arteries, and capillaries back to its parent stem cell in the marrow.

Harvard researchers have developed a hydrogel that can be easily injected into blood vessels, helping to stop uncontrolled bleeding even in patients on blood-thinners or with bleeding disorders.

Scientists and ethicists gathered at Harvard Law School to discuss the ethics of human embryo experimentation and whether a two-week developmental time limit on their use is appropriate any longer.

Despite decades of research aimed at understanding suicide, scientists are no better at predicting self-harm than they were a half-century ago.

New research highlights the skill and poise of doctors who tended to stranded crewmen in the famed Shackleton saga.

Scientists have shown that to interrupt the development of pigment cells that form their stripes, African striped mice and chipmunks both use a gene that until now had been associated primarily with cranio-facial development.

A new Harvard report addresses legal and ethical factors affecting the health of players in the National Football League, and makes recommendations to improve it.

Startup Magenta Therapeutics licenses technologies from Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital that could help transform treatment.

A new study examines whether lifestyle changes can offset genetic risk of heart disease.

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed an instrument that smokes cigarettes like a human, and delivers whole smoke to the air space of microfluidic human airway chips. The machine may enable new insights into how nonsmokers and COPD patients respond to smoke.

Restoring the cancer-killing zeal of T cells is being seen as one of the most successful new approaches to cancer treatment in nearly a decade, although researchers note it has shown effectiveness in only about a quarter of cases.

A new approach to manufacturing organs-on-chips developed by Harvard researchers could cut the length and cost of clinical trials significantly.

A Harvard Chan School study suggests that relaxing current U.S. guidelines could provide greater health benefits with less harm and for less money in women who are vaccinated against human papillomavirus.

Leaders from the scientific and business world gathered at Harvard Business School on Oct. 6 to examine regenerative medicine’s scientific and commercial promise.

According to Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson’s theory of “ecology of toxic inequality,” higher lead levels in the blood are often directly tied to racial and ethnic segregation.

Stem cell science is accelerating development of therapies for diabetes, ALS, other diseases, researchers tell HUBweek sessions.

Your brain is able to stitch together a coherent 360-degree panorama of the world around you, and now researchers are beginning to understand how.

By studying women ages 45 to 55, investigators at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital have found that reproductive stage, not simply chronological age, may contribute to changes in memory and brain function.

Programs to combat obesity may be aggravating eating disorders and undermining their severity, said experts during a panel discussion hosted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Using a machine-learning algorithm, researchers were able to “train” a computer to recognize the neural patterns associated with various scents, and identify whether specific odors were present in a mix of smells.

A new species of truffle fungus, related to the delicacy prized in Southern Europe, was found at the Arboretum by an undergrad researcher.

A new drug compound developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute to treat acute myeloid leukemia is gentle enough to use with patients too frail to endure chemotherapy.

Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is a slowly progressing type of blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow. Researchers discovered that CML stem cells die in response to inhibition of a protein called Ezh2. Drugs that target the protein are currently being tested in clinical trials for other cancers.

A gene therapy trial points to a healthier future for a young patient suffering from a rare immune disease.

Researchers examined a group of older adults with extraordinary memory performance and found that certain key areas of their brains resembled those of young people.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have built a giant petri dish to visually demonstrate how bacteria move as they become immune to drugs.