Viruses often get bad press. Likened to Trojan horses they are often associated with disease. But, i t is precisely because of their infectious nature that they can potentially be used as gene vectors - which are vehicles loaded with good copies of malfunctioning genes - and delivered to cells.

Brain diseases are particularly challenging to treat. Every substance that has to be delivered to the brain needs to overcome several obstacles, such as the blood-brain barrier—a system that prevents potentially dangerous substances, but also many drugs, to enter this organ—,to get to its target.

Scientists in Würzburg, in Germany, have created living bone material from human stem cells in their laboratory. The discipline is called tissue engineering and the aim of the scientists is to produce the perfect substitute for bone transplantation.

Bone is one of the most frequently transplanted tissues. And the demand is rising. Transplants treat large defects like those caused by trauma, complicated fractures, tumour resection or osteoporosis. ...

Bone grafts are among the most sought after tissue transplants in clinical practice. And this demand is expected to rise due to an ageing population.

Anthropogenic emissions have, until now, been collected, but not harmonised . These consist, for example, of data of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, smog, methane, CO 2 and even pollen and dust produced, among others by heavy industry and power plants.

Cancer: about one in three Europeans is confronted with this diagnosis during their lifetime. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ in Heidelberg are investigating the development of cancerous cells to find out how their growth is controlled and what goes wrong in cancer cells.

In 2012, about 8.2 million people died of cancer making the disease a major cause of death worldwide. According to the WHO World Cancer Report 2014 , this figure is expected to rise within the next two decades.

Targeted therapies have revolutionised the treatment of cancer since they were first introduced. Amongst the first medications approved in Europe, was the breast cancer drug Herceptin , which was approved in 2000.

Seafood sometimes poses health risks to consumers. Unfortunately, these are not very well defined. What is more, the risks associated with non-regulated contaminants, responsible for such health hazards, are not all well understood.

When it comes to the emergence of antimalarial drug resistance, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Millions of people die each year of malaria – a disease transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. There are major barriers in vaccine development as well as increased resistance to currently available therapies.

European researchers and clinicians are working hand in hand to unveil the mechanisms leading to back pain, likely the most widespread chronic pathology among humans .

Even if you do not suffer from pain in the intervertebral discs in your lower back, it is a sure bet that you know someone who does. Yet, surprisingly little is known about what causes this disc degeneration .

Lower back pain is a broad yet subtle subject. It has widely been associated with early degeneration of the discs of the human spine.

The impact if this challenge could be huge, as this set of data could l ead to new therapies and diagnosing tools for virtually all diseases , including diabetes or cancer.  Proteins are everywhere.

The human genome and those of several other organisms have been mapped. But it is proteins that perform the majority of biological functions within every organism .

More than ten years ago, scientists completely mapped the human genome. Now, the attention has turned to enumerating the entire human protein set. Proteins are of interest because they carry out most chemical activities in a cell.

We all get vitamin D in two ways – from our diet and from exposure to the sun.  A lack of this vitamin puts young children at risk of bone diseases like rickets and older children and adults at risk of bone softening .

Within the framework of the European ATLAS project, a team of researchers in Naples has created a LASER-based prototype that could revolutionize medicine and our knowledge of the human genome .