Research & University News

A three-year project to develop new strategies for tackling resistance to antibiotics will start in 2026, GSK Plc announced on 18 November. The project will receive £45 million from GSK to execute six projects which have been identified by Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, leaders of the Fleming Initiative in the UK. The funding will support an estimated 50 UK scientific and academic jobs focusing exclusively on antimicrobial resistance.

A trial for adults with major depressive disorder failed to significantly reduce the severity of the disorder compared with a placebo, according to the sponsor Neurocrine Biosciences Inc of San Diego, US. The Phase 2 study enrolled 73 adults with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and an inadequate response to at least one antidepressant in their regular treatment paradigm. The product, NBI-1070770, is a negative allosteric modulator of a subunit of a receptor that plays a role in the working memory. Participants received the drug or a placebo for four weeks.

A photovoltaic retinal implant developed by Science Corporation has restored central vision in patients with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to results from the multicentre PRIMAvera clinical study. 

A retrospective analysis published in Nature suggests that people treated for certain cancers, including melanoma and lung cancer, lived significantly longer if they had received an mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine before or shortly after starting immunotherapy. The findings hint that mRNA vaccines - initially designed to prevent infection - might also amplify anti-cancer immune responses.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, for the development of metal-organic frameworks. Their pioneering work has led to the creation of molecular materials with vast internal spaces that can capture, store and transform a range of substances - from water vapour to carbon dioxide and toxic gases.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance, a breakthrough that has transformed understanding of how the immune system avoids attacking the body’s own tissues.

Their pioneering research uncovered the identity and genetic control of regulatory T cells, the so-called “security guards” of the immune system that prevent autoimmune attack.

An Italian university, hospital, and biotech and diagnostic companies, have joined forces to develop new treatments for lung cancer patients targeting the human epidermal growth factor receptor 3 (HER3). The collaboration is expected to identify HER3-positive circulating tumour cells with the goal of developing targeted therapies for the disease. It includes the Sant’Andrea Hospital in Rome, the Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine at Sapienza University, also in Rome, the biotech company Takis Srl, and the diagnostics company Tethis SpA.

Scientists across 25 countries representing 51 different nationalities have been awarded €761 million from the European Union to support original research in the physical and life sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The awards were announced on 4 September by the European Research Council, a public body established by the European Commission in 2007. The programme falls under Horizon Europe, the European Union’s seven-year programme for research and development.

DeepMind Technologies Ltd, also known as Google DeepMind, has unveiled a new artificial intelligence tool that has demonstrated an ability to predict how mutations in human DNA sequences can impact the processes that regulate genes. The tool was described for the first time in the 25 June edition of Nature. Google DeepMind is also the developer of AlphaFold, the AI system for predicting the three dimensional structures of proteins.

A destructive cellular process long dismissed as the end of the biological road may in fact be central to the onset of human ageing and chronic disease, according to a new paper published in Nature Oncogene. The paper - co-authored by a global consortium of clinicians and scientists, including teams from LinkGevity, Mayo Clinic, Mass General Brigham, the European Space Agency, and University College London - argues that necrosis, a chaotic form of cell death, plays an active and targetable role in age-related degeneration.