Health and Medicine

The key role of computer technology in the fine-tuning of drug development and design will be considered by Professor Stephen Muggleton of Imperial College, London in his inaugural lecture, Models of Mind and Models of Body, today.

The new Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computing will focus on how machine learning and logic programming can reduce the high costs of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly overwhelm

Common viral infections in early childhood do not protect against allergy, concludes research in Thorax. If anything, the evidence points to an increased risk.

The findings contradict the increasingly popular if general theory that the rise in prevalence of allergies and asthma is partly attributable to the fact that children are less frequently exposed to viral infections early in life – the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis.’

The research focused on 889 pregnant Danish women, who wer

Peptic ulcer surgery seems to increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finds research in the Journal of Clinical Pathology.

Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer, largely because the prognosis is so poor.

Dutch researchers monitored the progress of 2633 patients who underwent surgery for the removal of a peptic or duodenal ulcer between 1931 and 1960. A preliminary analysis suggested that these patients had double the risk of developing pancrea

A woman’s fertility starts declining as early as her late 20s – not in her 30s as was previously thought, according to a study published today (Tuesday 30 April) in Human Reproduction*, Europe’s leading journal of reproductive medicine.
The finding comes from a US-Italian study of 782 healthy couples who were using natural family planning methods to avoid pregnancy.

US-based lead author Dr David Dunson said that, to his knowledge, this was the first study to observe that a woman’s fertil

A team including researchers at the Total Defense Research Institute, NBC Defense, in Umeå, Sweden, and the Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, are publishing in this week’s issue of Science new findings that show that the protein Ymt is of crucial importance for the capacity of the plague bacterium to survive and spread the plague via flea vectors. Professor Åke Forsberg and visiting researcher Dr. Peter Cherepanov are studying the properties that enable the plague bacterium Yersinia

Major new research examining the use of virtual surgery could revolutionise the way surgeons are trained in the future.

Experts use to believe that virtual reality, which allows trainee surgeons to feel and see exactly what they would if they were in the operating theatre, may help improve surgical skills, but it hadn’t been proved – until now.

The innovative research, by world experts from Yale University and Queen’s University Belfast, has shown that surgeons who trained o