Tumors require blood to emerge and spread. That is why scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center believe that targeting blood vessel cells known as pericytes may offer a potential new therapeutic approach when combined with vascular growth factors responsible for cell death.

A study lead by Valerie LeBleu, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Cancer Biology at MD Anderson, looked at how cellular signaling by vascular growth factors called angiopoietin-2 (ANG2), when combined with depletion of pericytes, may decrease breast cancer tumor growth that spreads to the lungs. Targeting pericytes and ANG2 signaling may also offer new potential therapy options for treatment of some breast cancers.

The discovery, development and approval of new drug treatments has been stymied. Bureaucracy, coupled with a short patent window and attorneys waiting to pounce, has led to increased interest in vaccines, which require a separate litigation process than just filing a lawsuit and collecting a settlement, or obscure diseases guaranteed to have high payouts - the home run strategy. 

And the when the public is not reading about how an FDA-approved drug hurt someone, or reading how drug companies are paying off doctors to get prescriptions, they want every new drug to be generic the moment it is developed. Small wonder small molecules are disappearing.

New evidence finds that the majority of infants at high-risk of developing an allergy to peanuts are protected from peanut allergy at age 5 years if they eat peanut frequently starting within the first 11 months of life. 

A survey asking if people took a flu vaccine revealed some interesting statistics - if their physician specifically recommended it, they were far more likely to have gotten one and vaccination rates among African-Americans was a low 62 percent.

90 percent of patients received vaccination if their physician advocated for it compared to 58 percent of patients whose physician did not, the results showed. Vaccination rates in European-Americans were 93 percent and in Asian-Americans 84 percent. Vaccination rates were 4X higher among patients who believed vaccination protected them than those who thought otherwise.

Just about everyone in the developed world has taken an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection and the instructions are well-known; don't stop after you start to feel better, even though you know they are killing machines.

Yet the picture may be more complex, according to a new paper, and it might change our understanding of why bacteria produce antibiotics in the first place. 

"For a long time we've thought that bacteria make antibiotics for the same reasons that we love them - because they kill other bacteria," said  Elizabeth Shank, an assistant professor of biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "However, we've also known that antibiotics can sometimes have pesky side-effects, like stimulating biofilm formation." 

A new paper based on a series of theoretical calculations using applied physics says that if you smoke 15 cigarettes in a sealed car in just over an hour, you could lose consciousness.

So crack a window. Or don't smoke in a car. Or don't smoke.

Why create the estimate? Starting this October, drivers in England will be banned from smoking in their cars if they are carrying children as passengers and the reason was not just because of vague epidemiological claims about second-hand or even third-hand smoke, but because of the real threat of carbon monoxide poisoning.