Medicine, Health

Researchers have identified serious data privacy vulnerabilities in the increasingly popular wearable devices, that threaten their trustworthiness.

As Alzheimer’s disease is associated with a wide variety of symptoms, usually observed through patients’ behaviour and actions, effective and timely treatment has proven elusive. An EU-funded project has contributed towards the capture of images which show the changes a brain with Alzheimer’s undergoes, at different ages, with promise for future diagnostics and treatment.

New research shows a positive state of mind can boost the effectiveness of vaccines such as the flu jab.

If that melody has just come to you, and if you know your way around a score, you might be able to think it into being now a group of researchers have developed a new brain-computer interface (BCI) application.

With around 100 million domestic cats estimated to be living in Europe, they are quite possibly the most popular pet. Yet, despite the clear incentive to maximise well-being both for our feline friends and so ourselves, remarkedly little research has gone into their early socialisation – until now.

Slow oscillations, associated with a lack of consciousness and the consolidation of memory, form waves of activity through the cerebral cortex during deep sleep. EU-funded research is investigating the transformation of slow wave sleep with age and has now revealed anomalies in this activity in mice displaying a decline similar to Alzheimer''s.

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has gone to three scientists for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms.

Digital technologies have never evolved at such an incredible pace. Yet, they are still leaving people behind: visually-impaired people, for example, are completely locked out from the use of touchscreen devices. An EU-funded consortium has therefore created the BlindPAD to exploit and enhance their remaining senses.

Not long ago it was orthodoxy that microscopes could not see images smaller than 200 nanometres. The relatively nascent field of nanoscopy has challenged this, with the EU-funded NANOSCOPY project leading the way.

Acanthamoeba keratitis (AK) is a relatively unknown disease affecting less than 0.1 in 10 000 EU citizens. Yet evidence suggests that its incidence is increasing. Whilst the market is too small for pharmaceutical companies, an EU-funded consortium has successfully conducted a Phase I clinical trial on PHMB as a treatment for AK, potentially preventing permanent visual impairment or blindness in patients.

It is known that the range of microbes found on farms protect children from asthma and allergies. Immunologists have now discovered that farm animals themselves also provide protection against inflammation of lung tissue, opening possibilities for new treatments.

Haptic sensors, connectivity and efficient telecommunications are some of the factors that enable the uptake of medical telerobotic systems. Technical capacity is timely as demographics put pressure on health services, while in remote areas, patients of all ages can find it hard to get appointments with specialists.

B- and T-cells have a central role in our immune systems. Produced in the spleen and the thymus respectively, receptor proteins on the cells’ surfaces recognise pathogens and respond. The nature of our defences is not completely understood but EU-supported research is helping to unveil some surprises.

A new study shows that using musical cues to learn physical tasks significantly develops an important part of the brain.

If you cut yourself or tear a muscle over time you will, hopefully, get better. Now researchers at a Belgium university have extended this self-healing property specifically to soft robots.

The lack of a formal link between neural network structure and its emergent function has hampered our understanding of how the brain processes information. The discovery of a mathematical framework to describe the emergent behaviour of the network in terms of its underlying structure comes one step closer.

If the knowledge that our brains can produce new cells in adulthood is ever going to help in the fight against neurodegenerative disease, we need to understand the underlying mechanisms more effectively. Towards this end, a new study drawing on EU-funded research, sheds further light on the role the protein APP plays in neuroplasticity.

Part-supported through the EU-funded RE-AGEING project, researchers offer population forecasting studies which encourage societies to break from outdated ageing measures and instead start categorising on how we live our lives.

The announcement earlier this month that a US-South Korean team have successfully modified disease causing DNA in embryos, has been widely heralded as a landmark in the long-promised genetic revolution for medicine. However, alongside recognition of the achievement has come the familiar mix of utopian and dystopian voices. But do these voices drown out measured consideration of the advance?

How do initially indolent forms of cancer evolve to become aggressive? In a quest to answer this long-standing question, an EU-funded project has studied the growth and clonal evolution of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) — a blood and bone marrow cancer that mostly starts asymptomatic but can become very aggressive over time.

Patient response to treatment — especially personalised medicine — can be very difficult to predict. To overcome this issue, the CHEMOS project has been advancing a new method for screening thousands of single-cell drug responses from small blood samples.

Part-supported through the EU-funded NEUROMICS project, researchers have identified a novel measure of disease progression for Huntington’s disease that could help slow down the disease and better target future therapies.

Almost half of patients with mature B cell neoplasia are faced with the ineffectiveness of existing treatments. However, they may soon benefit from new therapeutic tools relying on miRNA — a small non-coding RNA molecule involved in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression.

Although a source of much hope among ‘multiple myeloma’ (MM) patients, adoptive T cell therapies are still held back by expensive, lengthy, individual-tailored approaches. However, an EU-funded project is aiming to shake things up with off-the shelf solutions of its own.

On an initiative of Mrs. Cresson, Commissioner for research and development, Mr. Bangemann, Commissioner for industry, telecommunications and information technologies, and Mr. Kinnock, Commissioner for transport, the European Commission has set up six task forces to develop in...