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A Cambridge hospital has piloted the use of combined rapid point-of-care nucleic acid and antibody testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection after researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that this approach was superior to virus detection alone for diagnosing COVID-19 disease.PCR and antibody tests both have limitations because of the nature of cor…

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) failure and drug resistance are extremely common in patients living with HIV who are admitted to hospital in Malawi, according to new research published in Lancet HIV.These important findings highlight the threat posed by drug resistant HIV and call for rapid tests for drug resistant virus that could aid in determining …

Women who experience high blood pressure during pregnancy are more likely to develop heart disease and heart failure in later life, according to an international team of researchers.When we looked at all the available research, the answer was clear: women who develop high blood pressure during pregnancy – even when it doesn’t develop into pre-eclam…

An algorithm that analyses MRI images and automatically detects small changes in knee joints over time could be used in the development of new treatments for arthritis.Thanks to the engineering expertise of our team, we now have a better way of looking at the jointJames MacKayA team of engineers, radiologists and physicians, led by the University o…

Repurposing existing medicines focused on known drug targets is likely to offer a more rapid hope of tackling COVID-19 than developing and manufacturing a vaccine, argue an international team of scientists in the British Journal of Pharmacology."[Repurposed drugs] will have already been shown to be safe and so, if they can now be shown to be effect…

A new rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19, developed by a University of Cambridge spinout company and capable of diagnosing the infection in under 90 minutes, is being deployed at Cambridge hospitals, ahead of being launched in hospitals nationwide.This is a game changerSir Chris HohnThe SAMBA II machines, developed by Diagnostics for the Real World…

A new multinational study has shown how the process of distinguishing viruses and bacteria could be accelerated through the use of computational methods.The researchers, led by the University of Edinburgh, with colleagues from Cambridge, London, Slovenia and China, used a combination of theoretical and experimental methods to develop a strategy to …

The race is on to find a vaccine against the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Professor Jonathan Heeney explains why a cautious approach is needed and how his team is using new technology developed for influenza and Ebola viruses to target the new infection.A vaccine strategy needs to be laser specific, targeting those domains of the virus’s structure tha…

The world’s first licensed, downloadable artificial pancreas app for people with type 1 diabetes launches today, based on over a decade of research by Professor Roman Hovorka at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.This is a major stepping stone towards providing widely available, clinically proven, an…

Inflammation in the brain may be more widely implicated in dementias than was previously thought, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge. The researchers say it offers hope for potential new treatments for several types of dementia.We predicted the link between inflammation in the brain and the build-up of damaging proteins, but eve…

The University of Cambridge and Royal Papworth Hospital held an official ground-breaking ceremony at the new Heart and Lung Research Institute (HLRI) in Cambridge earlier today. The Institute is based on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and will create the largest cardiothoracic centre for research, education, industry collaboration, and clinical ca…

Bumetanide – a prescription drug for oedema (the build-up of fluid in the body) – improves some of the symptoms in young children with autism spectrum disorders and has no significant side effects, confirms a new study from researchers in China and the UK. Published today in Translational Psychiatry, the study demonstrates for the first time that t…

A new type of scan that involves magnetising molecules allows doctors to see in real-time which regions of a breast tumour are active, according to research at the University of Cambridge and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.This is one of the most detailed pictures of the metabolism of a patient’s breast cancer that we’…

Proteins in our blood could in future help provide a comprehensive ‘liquid health check’, assessing our health and predicting the likelihood that we will we will develop a range of diseases, according to research published today in Nature Medicine.Proteins circulating in our blood are a manifestation of our genetic make-up as well as many other fac…

A newly-discovered molecular mechanism that allows damaged adult liver cells to regenerate could pave the way for drugs to treat conditions such as cirrhosis or other chronic liver diseases where regeneration is impaired. We now understand how adult liver cells respond to the changes caused by tissue injury. This paves the way for exciting future w…