An emerging way to treat diabetes is to repair or replace the cells in the body that naturally produce insulin. Swedish researchers have now identified a molecule that helps stimulate the growth of new insulin-producing cells, and uncovered how it works, opening up new potential diabetes treatments.

Diabetes is characterized by issues with insulin, the hormone that regulates blood glucose levels and allows the body’s cells to access it for energy. In type 1 diabetes, beta cells in the pancreas that normally produce insulin can’t make enough to meet demand, often because those cells have been destroyed by the immune system.

Treatment currently relies on administering insulin shots, but an emerging branch of study centers on finding ways to replenish the insulin production of those beta cells. Previous breakthroughs have included creating artificial beta cells that can pick up the slack, or using stem cells to grow new ones.

A new mechanism that causes cardiac hypertrophy – one of the major drivers of heart disease – has been identified, potentially enabling new treatments to be developed.

Cancer, in the simplest terms, is the transformation of normal cells into malignant ones that grow and divide uncontrollably. It, however, is not one disease but a group of more than 100 different and distinctive diseases, and leukemia, or blood cancer, is just one of them. Leukemia begins in…

And researchers have hailed it as a breakthrough.

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In what appears to be a very promising breakthrough for the treatment of rectal cancer, a small drug trial conducted in the US found every patient treated in the experiment had their cancer successfully go into remission.

The medication given, called dostarlimab and sold under the brand name Jemperli, is an immunotherapy drug used in the treatment of endometrial cancer, but this was the first clinical investigation of whether it was also effective against rectal cancer tumors.

The early results reported so far suggest it is surprisingly effective, with the research team saying the successful cancer remission seen in every trial patient may be unprecedented for a cancer drug intervention.