Reform of federal drug discount program should target misaligned incentives, researchers say

A team of researchers led by Rice University, in collaboration with colleagues in Mozambique and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, has developed a simple, affordable human papillomavirus (HPV) test that delivers results in less than an hour with no specialized laboratory required. The breakthrough could provide an option for women in low-resource settings to be screened and treated for cervical cancer in a single clinic visit, a step that global health experts say could save countless lives. The research was recently published in Nature Communications.

A company called uniQure has announced promising results from a trial of a new gene therapy for Huntington's disease. The news has spread quickly through families affected by this condition, who have been desperately waiting for a treatment that can stop or slow down this devastating illness.

At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, on the corruption of science, witnesses presented an unpublished study that made a big assertion.

Research has revealed a steep increase in liver disease in recent years. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence of health harms from alcohol, including drinking at levels that were previously considered "moderate." These developments make a persuasive case for viewing alcohol consumption from a public health perspective.

Angel Martí, chair of Rice University's Department of Chemistry, is leading efforts to highlight chemistry's role in advancing brain health research. With Texas voters set to decide on Proposition 14 in November, which would create the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT), Martí says now is the right time to underscore how fundamental science paves the way for breakthroughs in treating Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and related disorders.

Resuscitation Care Units (RCUs) provide intensive, comprehensive and immediate medical care for critically ill patients with life-threatening conditions, such as cardiac arrest, requiring specialized monitoring and rapid intervention from a multidisciplinary team. Many studies have shown that creating these special high-acuity areas in an emergency department, can save lives and improve patient outcomes. However, questions about financial sustainability have slowed adoption of these units.

Could a simple blood test reveal how well someone is aging? A team of researchers led by Wolfram Weckwerth from the University of Vienna, Austria, and Nankai University, China, has combined advanced metabolomics with cutting-edge machine learning and a novel network modeling tool to uncover the key molecular processes underlying active aging.

Asking people how much money they would accept to experience pain again can provide a more accurate and comparable measure of pain levels than the familiar 1–10 scale, according to an international research team led by Lancaster University.

Parents improved their use of appropriate child car seats after remote motivational counseling and mobile-based support, according to the results from a randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open. The intervention included tailored web content, periodic text messages and personalized feedback on photos parents submitted every four to six weeks showing how their child usually travels in a car.

A large, long-term study led by an Albert Einstein College of Medicine researcher has found that the introduction of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in community settings is highly effective in protecting young women from infections caused by the cervical-cancer-causing virus—including women who didn't even receive the vaccine. The study was published today in JAMA Pediatrics.

For over three decades, HIV has played an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with researchers, making treating—and possibly even curing—the disease a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to achieve.

The Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, together with multiple academic medical centers and one industry partner (Medtronic) across the US, Canada, Europe, and Jordan, reports that long-term at-home adaptive deep brain stimulation was tolerable, effective, and safe in people with Parkinson's disease previously stable on continuous stimulation.

For millions of Americans living with heart failure, getting the right medications at the right doses can be a slow and frustrating process, which can lead to delayed treatment adjustments, undertreatment and risks for worsening symptoms.

Rose Baumann would be the first to say that there's a need for more government attention to autism.

The federal administration offered health guidance at a press conference this week, urging pregnant women to avoid using the over-the-counter painkiller acetaminophen, marketed in the U.S. as Tylenol, saying use of the medication is associated with a higher risk of having children with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.

Researchers at the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital have developed a promising new immunotherapy targeting the CTNNB1 gene mutation associated with various aggressive cancers such as lung and prostate cancer. This approach has effectively eliminated tumors in animal studies and could benefit thousands of patients with this mutation. Published in Nature Immunology, the study represents a significant breakthrough in T-cell receptor (TCR) therapy.

In July, the Trump administration unveiled two policies: the "Making Health Technology Great Again" initiative and the executive order "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets." At first glance, one seems aimed at health care modernization and the other at public safety. But beneath their branding lies a shared infrastructure (and agenda) that poses a profound threat to the civil rights, privacy and bodily autonomy of millions of Americans.

A team of scientists at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) has published new evidence suggesting that the brain's protective shield—known as the blood-brain barrier (BBB)—remains largely intact in a commonly used mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. The discovery challenges long-standing assumptions that Alzheimer's disease causes the BBB to "leak," potentially reshaping how researchers think about drug delivery for the disease.