Medication

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.

Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, but nature sometimes has room for improvement. Now a team from the Institute for Protein Design and the University of California San Francisco has created a new artificial protein that acts like a switch, turning regular cells into “smart cells.”

​Despite some promising research, there is currently no one reliable cure for vitiligo. There may be new hope, however, as a recent study has shown an existing medication to be quite effective at repigmenting the affected skin.

Researchers have uncovered a new weakness that could be exploited to produce new antiviral drugs. The team discovered a compound that can prevent certain classes of viruses from infecting cells, paving the way for new treatments against diseases like the common cold, meningitis or polio.