Medicine

Scientists have shown that resveratrol and resveratrol-like molecules may prolong life, but how might they do this?

The problem with pills Did you know that when you take a pill, the active ingredient in that pill diffuses throughout your entire body? When you have a headache you may take an over-the-counter pain medication, but this drug does not just concentrate in…

Think back to the last time you took medicine — perhaps it was a pain reliever or some cough syrup. What were you thinking about as that medicine was digested? Chances are, you weren’t thinking about the origins of the drug, but scientists and doctors…

-- You may have recently heard of the first person to be cured of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Timothy Ray Brown was HIV-positive and also had acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer that…

-- Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as…

-- Scientists and prostate cancer patients alike cheered when the FDA approved Provenge, the first therapeutic vaccine for prostate cancer, in April 2010. A few months later, a second group of researchers published a clinical study that suggested the…

A study published this summer in the journal Science found, for the first time, significant success in preventing HIV infection using a vaginal microbicidal gel [1]. This finding is an important step in our understanding of HIV prevention and in curbing…

It takes a life every 30 seconds and sickens almost 250 million people a year… but this is no AIDS epidemic; no newly emerged disease that medical science is scrambling to control.  Malaria has been a scourge of mankind throughout recorded history,…

What do the world’s “bottom billion” — the approximate number of the world’s citizens earning less than $1.25 USD per day — have in common? Aside from poor living conditions, malnutrition, and political voicelessness, they are also all more likely to…

Ellen ’t Hoen is the executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool Foundation and was the Senior Advisor on Intellectual Property for UNITAID, a global health funding agency hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. She was also the…