An unproven stem cell therapy conducted by a Florida clinic has blinded three patients in an apparent clinical trial gone horribly wrong. The incident showcases the extent to which unscrupulous clinics will take advantage of desperate patients—and how the lack of government oversight contributes to the problem.
As 2016 draws to a close, two of what started out as this year’s most promising new cancer therapies have ground to a halt amidst patient deaths during the experimental treatments.
Ecstasy isn’t only for ravers—a small series of clinical trials have demonstrated taking MDMA can be an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration granted permission for large-scale, Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA, which is the next step in the process to get…
Just days after shutting down tests of a groundbreaking new cancer therapy in the wake of three patient deaths, the US Food and Drug Administration has said the trials can resume. So what changed?
Clinical trials of a promising new therapy, in which white blood cells are reprogrammed to attack cancer cells, has resulted in the deaths of three patients. In response, the US Food and Drug Administration has ordered a temporary halt to the trial.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has granted clinical trial approval for an experimental Zika vaccine. The drug, which will be tested on a small sampling of human participants, arrives a mere five months after the World Health Organization declared Zika a public health emergency.
The World Health Organization (WHO) called for greater transparency in medical research this week, moving that results from clinical trials for medical products be disclosed in open, free-to-access publications within twelve months of studies' completion, whatever their findings.
The clinical trial process is what every drug or medical device goes through before it comes to market. And it's difficult for the public to understand for many reasons, including proprietary claims on information, complicated scientific jargon, bureaucracy, and good, old-fashioned corruption. We asked Molly Maloof,…
If you are depressed, or schizophrenic or have Alzheimer's, scientists say you probably have a shrunken hippocampus. The good news: a drug that just entered human trials promises to re-grow that part of the brain.
The National Institutes of Health has halted all new funding for studies using chimpanzees, humans' closest evolutionary relatives, as scientific models for humans.
The first European embryonic stem cell therapy in humans is about to start in London. Surgeons will insert the controversial cells into the eyes of 12 patients suffering from Stargardt's macular dystrophy, a major cause of blindness in young people.
It's been a big month for gene therapy: first a breakthrough for leukemia last week, now today scientists announced they've successfully treated kids with "bubble boy" disease.
The news is full of headlines about some drug that has cured mice of everything from baldness to paralysis. Although these advances are real, their useful medical application for humans seems out of reach. What does it take for drugs to make the jump from animals to human testing? And when does a drug being tested on…
A new method for detecting the levels of amyloid proteins in the brain, a key feature of Alzheimer's Disease, lets researchers figure out if a drug is reducing their prevalence, as one new drug has done. But there's a catch.
