news 2024

The first ever targeted treatment for brain tumours in children has been approved for NHS patients, following over 20 years of research by a UCL clinician scientist. Professor Darren Hargrave, who is a researcher at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH), was the Chair of the TADPOLE-G trial steering group, alongside researchers across the world.

Machines can learn not only to make predictions, but to handle causal relationships. An international research team shows how this could make medical treatments safer, more efficient, and more personalised. Artificial intelligence techniques can be helpful for multiple medical applications, such as radiology or oncology, where the ability to recognise patterns in large volumes of data is vital.

Risks highest soon after starting drugs, underscoring need for increased caution in early stages of treatment, say experts Antipsychotic use in people with dementia is associated with higher risks of a wide range of serious health outcomes compared with non-use, according to a new study from a collaboration across the Universities of Manchester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Dundee.

People with long COVID have distinct patterns of inflammation detectable in the blood, which could potentially be targeted with immune therapies. Findings from the largest UK study of patients hospitalised with SARS-CoV-2 infection show that long COVID leads to ongoing inflammation which can be detected in the blood.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have achieved a groundbreaking advancement in catalyst technology. They have developed a new catalyst which has been shown to have a wide variety of uses and the potential to streamline optimisation processes in industry and support new scientific discoveries.

Researchers have developed a new platform for the synthesis, analysis and testing of new compounds which may one day treat cancer The discovery of new compounds with pharmacological properties can be expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in developing workflows that allow for the rapid synthesis and testing of multiple compounds in parallel.

Vaccination not only reduces the severity of TB in infected cattle, but reduces its spread in dairy herds by 89%, research finds. Our study suggests that vaccination not only reduces the progression of the disease, but that if vaccinated animals become infected, they are substantially less infectious to others.

But PHQ-9 questionnaire used to monitor primary care patients did reveal benefits across six months A commonly used questionnaire adopted by GPs to monitor the treatment of depression does not provide any immediate benefits to patients, a new study has found. Primary care researchers testing the PHQ-9 assessment, which measures the severity of depression, found it did nothing to improve people's symptoms after 12 weeks.

There is no evidence that locum doctors are less clinically competent or practice less safely than permanent doctors, a study in England led by University of Manchester researchers has shown. Some differences in practice and performance of locum and permanent GPs were found, however the researchers suggest they are likely to be shaped by the organisational setting and systems within which they work.

A drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis could also prevent the disease in individuals deemed to be at risk. Results from a Phase 2b clinical trial, published in The Lancet by a team led by King's College London and involving Birmingham researchers, provides hope for arthritis sufferers after it showed that the biologic drug abatacept reduces progression to this agonising chronic inflammatory disease.

A simple, safe and accurate test that identifies women with womb cancer from a sample taken from the vagina has been developed by clinician scientists from The University of Manchester. The research, published in the journal Ebiomedicine, part of the Lancet Discovery Science, reports that the test has over 95% accuracy in identifying post-menopausal women with cancer as the cause of their bleeding, and is more accurate than current methods.

Imaging technology could provide a ground-breaking new approach for diagnosing and treating bowel cancer patients, thanks to Cancer Research scientists in Glasgow. Biopsies are currently used to diagnose bowel cancer but require an invasive procedure which offers risks, such as potential infection, and are unable to capture an entire picture of what is happening in a patient's bowel.

A blood test could help identify those at highest risk of dying from heart failure, new research has found. The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation, found that patients with highest levels of a protein called neuropeptide Y (NPY) were 50 per cent more likely to die from a heart complication over the three years that the research was conducted, compared to those with lower levels.

Focusing on rare conditions could significantly reduce the burden of kidney disease on both patients and the NHS, according to a major new study led by UCL and the UK Kidney Association. The study, published in The Lancet to mark World Kidney Day, draws on the largest rare kidney disease dataset ever created.

Children with acute malnutrition across Africa and Asia have a higher risk of treatment failure and malaria reinfection, even after being given the best currently available and recommended malaria treatment. Researchers from the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) at Oxford University analysed data from over 11,000 young children for this study, published in Lancet Global Health .

A new study involving UCL researchers has found that better prostate cancer treatments could reach men almost two years earlier than is currently possible. Currently, it takes around 10 years for new treatments to be studied in large-scale trials. However, the new research showed that the length of time a man lives without his cancer progressing - known as progression-free survival - reasonably predicts how long he will eventually live ('overall survival').

Researchers at UCL and UCLH have successfully completed the first trial of a therapy designed to restore hearing loss. The REGAIN trial, the results of which were published in Nature Communications , was the first study of a treatment aimed at restoring lost hearing, focusing on a drug with the technical name gamma secretase inhibitor LY3056480.

People in the UK were treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy less often than in comparable countries and faced long waits for treatments, according to two new studies led by UCL researchers. For the two papers, published in The Lancet Oncology and part-funded by Cancer Research UK, an international team of researchers examined data from over 780,000 people with cancer diagnosed between 2012 and 2017 in four comparable countries (Australia, Canada, Norway and the UK).

The currently recommended five-day course of molnupiravir, an antiviral treatment, may not be long enough to treat COVID-19, according to a new paper involving UCL researchers. The study, published in Nature Communications , was conducted as part of PANORAMIC, an ongoing clinical trial evaluating potential treatments for COVID-19.

A reusable vest that can map the electric impulses of the heart in fine detail could detect abnormalities from a potentially fatal heart disease much earlier than is currently possible, suggests a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology , found that an electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) vest, developed by Dr Gaby Captur at UCL, could detect electrical changes associated with an inherited heart muscle condition at a stage when standard tests do not pick up signs of disease.