Health

A newly developed portable, point-of-care PET technology can image any organ, delivering high-quality results to guide interventional procedures. With real-time visual feedback, the bedside technology provides a cost-effective approach for hospitals to perform biopsies, tumor ablations, and other procedures in constrained clinical environments.

A team of Rice University mechanical and electrical engineering students has developed an interactive, modular rehabilitation system designed to make stroke recovery more engaging, adaptable and effective for patients at home. The project, called TacTile, was created in Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) and earned top honors at the HUFF OEDK Engineering Design Showcase, where it won first place in the Willy Revolution Award for Outstanding Innovation.

Immune checkpoint therapy, a type of cancer immunotherapy that helps the immune system recognize and attack tumors, has transformed cancer treatment. While these therapies can produce long-lasting benefits for some patients, many cancers either fail to respond or become resistant over time.

Even while listening, the brain attempts to anticipate the next words. This is the conclusion reached by a current study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by PD Dr. Patrick Krauss, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), and PD Dr. Achim Schilling, Heidelberg University. The researchers combined three methods: a natural listening situation, high resolution measurements of brain activity, and an AI language model as reference.

New evidence has emerged showing that diabetes developed during pregnancy is likely an early manifestation of type 2 diabetes, triggered by the stresses pregnancy places on the body. In the largest study of its kind, University of Queensland researchers collaborated with the Genetics of Diabetes In Pregnancy (GenDIP) Consortium to analyze data from more than 38,000 women with gestational diabetes and 776,000 without the condition, finding significant genetic similarities between the two conditions.

A new study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington provides the most comprehensive and conservative analysis to date of alcohol's complex relationship with health, showing clear cancer risks and chronic liver diseases at any level, along with mixed evidence for other cardiometabolic conditions.

A new PET tracer targeting carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX) has demonstrated exceptional sensitivity and high tumor-to-background contrast in detecting clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), according to early clinical research. The newly developed tracer, 68Ga-RCC78, successfully identified additional metastatic lesions missed by standard imaging while significantly reducing abdominal background noise, offering a powerful new tool for kidney cancer staging.

In a recent study, Stevens researchers have shown how colorectal cancers can evolve from mature intestinal cells that revert to stem cells. These findings explain why colorectal cancers are so resistant to treatment and can help inform the development of effective therapies for intestinal tumors.

Previously, immature overall survival results of the NRG Oncology GY018 (NRG-GY018) trial suggested that the use of the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab in combination with chemotherapy improved overall survival for patients with advanced stage or recurrent endometrial cancer when compared to chemotherapy alone. Notably, this benefit was observed in both the mismatch repair proficient (pMMR) and mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) populations.

Amid growing concern about the widespread off-label use of sedative medications for sleep problems, Flinders University researchers have led a world-first clinical trial examining how a commonly prescribed "sleeping pill" affects sleep, breathing and next-day performance.

In Las Vegas May 2026, athletes compete in an international sporting event that explicitly allows them to use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). The Enhanced Games openly encourages competitors to use substances banned in virtually every mainstream sport, including anabolic steroids, erythropoietin and peptide hormones. Organizers have claimed that with proper medical supervision, this is safe. It is a bold proposition and, according to Professor Ian Boardley of the University of Birmingham, a dangerous one.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they used a form of magnetic imaging to track cell therapy injections commonly used to treat certain autoimmune diseases and cancers. The findings, from a study of mice, add to a growing body of evidence that magnetic particle imaging (MPI), a new technique that allows scientists to visualize therapeutic cells as they inject them, may eventually help researchers personalize cell therapy treatments for individual patients. The study is published in Science Advances.

A new SPECT/CT imaging approach can accurately differentiate inflammation from fibrosis in interstitial lung disease (ILD) patients, according to new research presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 2026 Annual Meeting, held May 30 to June 2 in Los Angeles. This molecular imaging technique has the potential to determine which patients would benefit from anti-inflammatory treatments and which would likely only experience harmful side effects.

FDA-approved carbon copies of brand-name drugs with expired patents—over the last 30 years, these generic drugs have saved trillions of dollars for hundreds of millions of people.

Our body receives and processes a vast number of signals. Chemical signals serve as guidance cues and ensure, for example, that immune cells arrive exactly where they are needed. Many vital processes such as sensory perception, immune responses, cardiovascular function and communication between neurons are regulated by a large group of proteins on the cell surface: G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) pick up signals from the environment and transmit them to the cytoplasm of the cell.