Why is pancreatic cancer so lethal?

By Yuki Agarwala Pancreatic cancer is known to be one of the deadliest cancers in the world: in the UK, the survival rate is only 7.3% after 5 years, and drops to under 2% after 10 years (Pancreatic cancer, 2021). As the 10th most common cancer in the UK, pancreatic cancer is not extremely common,Continue

MTDL’s – The silver bullet to Alzheimers disease?

By Killian Robinson Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease that causes neurological deterioration which can often lead to other diseases like dementia. There are currently 50 million cases of Alzheimer’s worldwide which is a startling figure and is estimated to almost double every decade, with 82 million cases projected in 2030 and 152 million in 2050Continue

Epigenetic remodelling drugs in cancer treatment

By Sabino Méndez Pastor There is no doubt that cancer is one of the major health burdens of our time. The World Health Organisation (World Health Organisation, 2021) estimates that it claimed 9.6 million lives in 2018, making it the second leading cause of death globally. Cancer chemotherapy has been one of the most importantContinue

The Secret to Skin Anti-Ageing

By Linya Thng  Characterized as the most voluminous organ of the body, the skin is not subject to intrinsic and extrinsic ageing. Briefly summarizing, intrinsic aging is defined by an individual’s genetic background and is dependent on time whilst extrinsic aging is influenced by environmental factors such as sun exposure, air pollution, smoking, alcohol abuse,Continue

Fighting Cancer with Bacteriophages

By Jessica Lu Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that specifically infect and replicate in bacterial cells. Although they are bacterial viruses, phages may be used in promising new methods to fight cancer because they are easy to genetically modify and are generally regarded as non-pathogenic (Abbaszadeh et al., 2021). These methods to fight cancer generally useContinue

Malaria Vaccination: The road ahead

By Hannah Scheucher With the whole world intently watching the roll out of COVID-19 vaccines, another development in the field of vaccines is striking headlines. The WHO set a target for production of a vaccine against malaria with 75% efficacy (the % reduction of disease in vaccinated groups compared to those who are unvaccinated) -Continue

Monoclonal Antibodies in Cancer Therapy

By Audrey Ko Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are laboratory-produced proteins that mimic the action of ordinary antibodies produced by our immune system. Since the first monoclonal antibody, Muromonab, was licensed for clinical use in 1986 (Lu et al., 2020), there has been extensive research in the therapeutic effects of these molecules. As of 2019, 80 therapeuticContinue

How are drugs broken down inside our bodies?

By Yuchen Lin When we are ill, we take various kinds of drugs to fight against the disease. But after drugs exert their functions, how do our bodies get rid of them? Lots of drugs are toxic to most of the cells in our body. If we do not detoxify them after they’ve done theirContinue

Using immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat cancer

By Cristina Riquelme Vano There are more than a hundred sixty-six thousand cancer deaths in the UK every year according to Cancer Research UK (Cancer Statistics for the UK. 2021). One of the reasons why cancer is so hard to tackle is that cancer cells are very similar to normal cells. Only a few geneticContinue

The future of vaccination

By Sabino Méndez Pastor In 1796, Edward Jenner demonstrated that cowpox infection gave long term protection against the smallpox virus (Maruggi et al., 2019). Since then, vaccines have become one of the most effective public health tools ever developed by saving an estimate of 2.5 million lives each year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus andContinue