Medication

When a patient is receiving medication, it can be difficult to determine how much of the drug is actually making its way into their bloodstream. A new subdermal "tattoo" could help, thanks to its color-changing gold nanoparticles.

Even though at-home use of an inhaler or insulin pen can be extremely important, doctors have to pretty much just hope that patients are doing it right. A new system, however, could objectively assess patients' technique within their homes.

In order to see if an antidepressant works, patients have to take the drug for at least a month. New research, however, suggests that by monitoring a sleeping patient's brainwaves, the effectiveness of an antidepressant can be gauged in a week.

Opioid pain relievers not only produce potential side effects such as nausea and constipation, but they can also be highly addictive. Australian scientists have therefore created what could be a better medication, that is made using tarantula venom.

Giving oneself daily injections of insulin or other drugs is both painful and a hassle. A new "robo-pill" may make doing so unnecessary, however – and it reportedly performed well in its first human trials.

If you want pharmaceuticals to be cheap and plentiful, then you need a fast and inexpensive way of making them. With this in mind, Canadian scientists are developing a system that encapsulates liquid medication more speedily than ever before.

Tuberculosis is a difficult disease to treat, and help may now be coming from an unexpected source – a sea sponge.

A team at MIT has developed a new capsule that would survive a trip through the stomach and deliver its drug payload to the lining of the small intestine via microneedles.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of the disease, thanks largely to the fact that the tumors tend to be much more solid. But now researchers have identified a promising new drug candidate that could linger for longer to worm its way in, and works when paired with other cancer drugs.

Organ development has traditionally been tricky to study, thanks largely to the difficulty in getting sensors in there without damaging the organs. Now, researchers from Harvard have developed a way to create “cyborg organoids” by integrating nanoelectronics into cell cultures.

Researchers at EPFL have developed a new biodegradable circuit that can be implanted to deliver painkillers in the body on demand. When the device is heated up from a source outside the body, it releases a controlled dose of a drug, before safely dissolving away when it’s no longer needed.

Feverfew is a common flower easily recognizable either from a home garden or the shelf of the local health store. Now, researchers from the University of Birmingham have engineered a compound from the leaves of this plant that might be a potent cancer killer.