There is still no treatment that can reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease , a condition estimated to affect  10 million people  worldwide.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

Fourteen pairs of identical twins joined the EU funded medical project “ Fight-MG ”, to fight Myasthenia Gravis . This rare autoimmune disease leads to abnormal fatigability of various skeletal muscles.

Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a rare auto-immune disease—whereby patients’ immune systems attack their own bodies— arising from a breakdown in communications between the nervous and muscular systems.

Collaboration between research groups is key in tackling rare diseases such as auto-immune disease Myasthenia Gravis (MG). Indeed, the rarity of the disease means that it can be difficult to collect enough samples of blood and tissues to perform quality research.

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

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.

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.

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 .

Millions of people undergo surgery each year. Many of them suffer from moderate to severe pain afterwards. This post-operative pain may impede recovery or even lead on into chronic pain .

Modern information technologies allow medical researchers to draw on a huge pool of patient data. These are routinely assessed in hospital settings or through health care systems.

About 20 million Europeans are subject to food allergies. Now scientists are looking at these allergies in new ways. It involves the food industry in its work and pays special attention to the link between early diets and allergy in later life .

European scientists set up new therapeutic approaches to tackle specific Lysosomal Storage Disorders: a new drug combination and enzyme replacement therapy against Pompe disease and gene therapy against MPS V I (Mucopolysaccharidosis VI).

There is a hepatitis C epidemic in Egypt. Ironically, this is in large part due to a public health campaign in the 1960s and 1970s, during which injection needles were being re-used.

Talking or reading. Texting a message or listening. The dilemma of choosing between various tasks is not an invention of the modern information age. Humans and all vertebrates have to prioritise their actions.