Philippa Roxby Heath Reporter Laura Marston Laura now feels good six years after her diagnosis of advanced tongue cancer Hundreds of thousands of people with advanced head and neck cancer could live longer without their cancer returning thanks to an immunotherapy drug, a clinical trial suggests. This is the first sign of a breakthrough for … Read more
A new treatment approach can significantly improve survival rates for patients with aggressive, inherited breast cancer, a study suggests. The trial, led by Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, and published in Nature Communications, involved women with early-stage breast cancer who have inherited BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations. Giving them the targeted drug olaparib before surgery greatly … Read more
Amy Cole BBC Midlands Today Shannen Headley BBC News, West Midlands BBC Eve Morgan took part in the ‘Big Baby’ trial in 2018, giving birth to her son 10 days early Women pregnant with larger babies have been given the option to choose how and when to give birth in a bid to lessen the … Read more
Michelle Roberts Digital health editor, BBC News Getty Images An annual injection designed to guard against Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has completed an important early safety trial, researchers report in The Lancet medical journal. Lenacapavir stops the virus from replicating inside cells. If future trials go well – now it has passed the first, Phase … Read more
Nearly 700,000 women are to be recruited to take part in an NHS artificial intelligence (AI) breast cancer screening trial in England. Five different AI platforms will be tested across 30 sites from April to see if the technology can speed up diagnosis as well as free up radiologists. It comes as the government launches … Read more
Philippa Roxby Health reporter University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein The heart muscle patches are grown from millions of human stem cells Damaged hearts could be mended using small “patches” of heart muscle grown in the lab, say scientists writing in Nature. The technology could give new hope to millions of people with advanced heart failure whose treatment … Read more
Getty Images Two NHS hospital trusts in London are using AI technology to see if they can spot type 2 diabetes in patients up to a decade in advance of the condition occuring. Imperial College and Chelsea and Westminster hospital NHS foundation trusts have started training the AI system – called Aire-DM – that checks … Read more
Getty Images It is among the most delicate and controversial challenges in modern medicine – how to determine whether the benefits of puberty blockers (or drugs that delay puberty) outweigh the potential harms. This question came to the fore in June 2023 when NHS England proposed that in the future, these drugs would only be … Read more
Bengaluru: Elon Musk‘s Neuralink said on Wednesday it has received approval to launch its first clinical trial in Canada for a device designed to give paralysed individuals the ability to use digital devices simply by thinking. The brain chip startup said the Canadian study aims to assess the safety and initial functionality of its implant … Read more
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Paul Read was the first patient recruited in a new therapy trial for treating brain tumours A man’s brain tumour has shrunk by half in a matter of weeks thanks to a new radioactive therapy. Paul Read, 62, from Luton, was the first patient to take part in … Read more