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WASHINGTON - The emerging science of gene drives has the potential to address environmental and public health challenges, but gene-drive modified organisms are not ready to be released into the environment and require more research in laboratories and highly controlled field trials, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

BAR HARBOR, MAINE - Scientists have long known that many diseases have a strong genetic component, but they are only recently paying more attention to the role played by the relationship between genetics and the environment.

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have shown that circadian oscillations in the influx of immune cells into the damaged tissue play a crucial role in exacerbating the effects of an acute heart attack in the early morning hours.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Researchers at the University of Michigan have identified a promising new compound for targeting one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer.

The compound, currently called UM-164, goes after a kinase known to play a role in the growth and spread of triple-negative breast cancer. UM-164 blocks the kinase c-Src and inhibits another pathway, p38, involved in this subtype. The researchers also found that the compound had very few side effects in mice.

In treating diseases with drugs, dosing is critical; too little is ineffective, while too much can be lethal. Colorado State University's Brad Reisfeld takes a mathematical approach to achieving optimal dosing for various drugs.

Publishing earlier this week in the American Society for Microbiology's Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Reisfeld, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and a faculty member in the School of Biomedical Engineering, has described a new computational model for optimizing dosing for the drug Rifapentine.

In an effort to identify a simple, reliable way to track the course of nasal polyps in chronic sinus disease, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they've linked rising levels of immune system white blood cells, called eosinophils, with regrowth of polyps removed by surgery.

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Lung cancer patients with oliogometastases, defined as three or fewer sites of metastasis, may benefit from aggressive local therapy, surgery or radiation, after standard chemotherapy, according to research led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. If validated in larger studies, the findings could represent a dramatic shift in clinical care for thousands of lung cancer patients.

NEWPORT, Ore. - Swirling eddies in the ocean have long been thought to be beneficial to organisms such as larval fishes residing within them because of enhanced phytoplankton production. However, direct evidence for this hypothesis has been hard to come by.

A new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which sequentially sampled tropical fish from their larval stages to their settlement in reefs, confirms the critical role of these oceanographic features.

Malaria parasites cause hundreds of millions of infections, and kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, mostly in Africa. And in recent years the most dangerous malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, has become increasingly resistant to the main anti-malarial drugs. Now, an international team of researchers shows that some members of a class of compounds called oxaboroles, which contain the element, boron, have potent activity against malaria parasites.

CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a new cause of Parkinson's disease -- mutations in a gene called TMEM230. This appears to be the third gene definitively linked to confirmed cases of the common movement disorder.

OAKLAND, Calif., June 6, 2016 -- Daughters of overweight mothers who develop gestational diabetes are significantly more likely to experience an earlier onset of one sign of puberty, according to new Kaiser Permanente research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Researchers from the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University have engineered endogenous protein inhibitors of protein-degrading enzymes as an alternative approach to synthetic inhibitors for potentially treating cancer and other diseases. Results of their study, titled "Thermodynamics of Selectivity in N-TIMP/MMP Interactions," were recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Research into kidney regeneration, an organ that has been extremely difficult to regenerate, has taken a great stride forward with research coming out of a collaboration between Kumamoto University, Japan and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the US. The research demonstrates a method of increasing kidney progenitor cell proliferation in vitro. These progenitor cells contribute to the formation of kidney tissues but normally disappear before or soon after birth.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - A new metastatic melanoma study suggests that a combination of two immunotherapies may be better than one:

Griffith University researchers have found evidence that demonstrates Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia, as reported in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal this week.

The work refutes an earlier landmark study that claimed to recover DNA sequences from the oldest known Australian, Mungo Man.

This earlier study was interpreted as evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians, and that Mungo Man represented an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.