Lincoln researchers are the first to show that metabolites produced by certain gut bacteria can positively affect the body’s immune response to cancer.

Humans cannot fully heal spinal cord injuries. When the spinal cord is damaged, the body’s immune system often spirals into chaos. This overwhelming inflammatory response creates permanent scar tissue that stops nerve cells from ever repairing themselves or their connections. Zebrafish, however, have mastered the biological art of managing this cellular chaos to completely heal spinal cord damage.

Modern anticancer medications that combine tumor-fighting drugs with proteins that specifically target cancer cells are a relatively new class of drugs, often given to patients for whom standard chemotherapy has not worked. The drugs are precise but can attack only one type of target in a cancer cell at a time. This limits their effectiveness against tumors containing multiple types of targets, which becomes more likely as cancer progresses or tumors become resistant to conventional therapies.

The most effective treatment for Parkinson’s remains L-dopa, also called levodopa, a medication that can dramatically improve movement and quality of life. But the relief often comes with a caveat: Over time, the drug’s benefits can become less reliable, and it can cause erratic, involuntary movements known as dyskinesia.

A blood test may predict if apparently healthy older adults are likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms in the next five or 10 years, researchers reported Wednesday.

A blood test for the biomarker phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) recently received federal clearance, but questions have emerged about the extent to which such tests can accurately predict whether a cognitively healthy individual will develop cognitive impairment—a key symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.

Blinding diseases caused by the degeneration of photoreceptors, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP), affect 200 million people worldwide and represent the leading causes of visual impairment and blindness.

The Martin-Hopkins equation to assess low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels in blood samples has been used by laboratories in the U.S. and other countries to guide efforts to lower cardiovascular disease risk. Now, a simplified machine-learning version of this equation has been shown in a study of millions of U.S. adult and child blood samples to match the accuracy of the original—making it broadly accessible.