Health

Scientists believe they have cracked the question of how the malaria parasite keeps a low profile in infected people during the dry season in Africa in order to avoid immune attention and trigger outbreaks when the rains and mosquitoes return. The knowledge could open up new ways to combat the disease, which killed 409,000 people, mostly children, in 2019 alone.

The idea of cryogenically freezing a person to preserve their body until many years into the future has long been a staple of science fiction stories. However, the need to reliably store biological materials such as cells or tissue is a common concern for scientific research and, increasingly, for society too.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are killing more people each year, but scientists are turning to their natural virus predators to treat infections, as well as new vaccines to prevent disease.

The current pandemic caught the world off guard but there are more to come, and we need to work out how to better prepare for and respond to future crises before they occur, an audience at the European Commission’s annual Research and Innovation Days conference has heard.

Viruses like Covid-19 make no distinction between those they infect. They should in theory cause disease in the rich just as they do the poor and pay no heed to social status or cultural background. But in practice the pandemic has widened the gulf between vulnerable groups and other populations in Europe rather than helping to level out inequalities in society, researchers warn.

Harmful bacteria found in chickens that can cause food poisoning outbreaks and devastate poultry flocks could be better controlled with innovative new solutions being developed by researchers.

Tiny nano-sized robots and vehicles that can navigate through blood vessels to reach the site of a disease could be used to deliver drugs to tumours that are otherwise difficult to treat.

Finding new viruses is easy – the hard part is understanding which ones cause disease, says Dr Lia van der Hoek, a virologist from the Amsterdam UMC, the Netherlands, who discovered a human coronavirus called NL63, in 2003. 

Four huge robot arms surround the gleaming metal shell of what will soon be a top-of-the-range automobile. They jerk into life, attaching the bonnet, the wing mirrors, and other panels. It’s the kind of precision operation you can find at car factories around the world these days. But here’s a question worth considering: could we pull off a feat like this only about a billion times smaller?

Only in cancer medicine do we aim to attack and kill legions of our own cells. But healthy bystander cells often get caught in deadly crossfire, which is why cancer treatments can cause severe side effects in patients.