Placebos are a sham — usually mere sugar pills designed to represent "no treatment" in a clinical treatment study. The effectiveness of the actual medication is compared with the placebo to determine if the medication works.

A trio of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers can accurately classify individuals who will develop Alzheimer's disease, according to a paper in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A team of scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, using groundbreaking technology, has identified no less than 3,600 molecular switches in the human body.

Research is increasingly becoming a networked process. The big genome studies are a good example of the need to pool the efforts of gold standard centers around the world. Only in this way is it possible to achieve results as solid as those obtained by the GenoMEL project, which is funded by the European Commission to study the genetic and environmental risk factors for melanoma. The objective is to translate this knowledge into recommendations based on evidence and healthier habits. The latest results obtained by this project, to published Online on Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics, have found a link between the risk of melanoma and two regions associated with skin pigmentation and a new region of the genome. GenoMEL is led by Leeds University and the IDIBAPS - Hospital Clínic of Barcelona researchers Dr. Susana Puig and Dr. Josep Malvehy are the only Spanish authors of this article.

A trio of genome-wide studies – collectively the largest to date – has pinpointed a vast array of genetic variation that cumulatively may account for at least one third of the genetic risk for schizophrenia. One of the studies traced schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in part, to the same chromosomal neighborhoods.

A team of researchers, including several from UCSF, has demonstrated that a new method for detecting and quantifying protein biomarkers in body fluids may ultimately make it possible to screen multiple biomarkers in hundreds of patient samples, thus ensuring that only the strongest biomarker candidates will advance down the development pipeline. The researchers have developed a method to increase accuracy in detecting real cancer biomarkers that is highly reproducible across laboratories and a variety of instruments so that cancer can be detected in its earliest stages.

A math-based game that has taken the world by storm with its ability to delight and puzzle may now be poised to revolutionize the fast-changing world of genome sequencing and the field of medical genetics, suggests a new report by a team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). The report will be published as the cover story in the July 1st issue of the journal Genome Research.

MicroRNAs are the newest kid on the genetic block. By regulating the unzipping of genetic information, these tiny molecules have set the scientific world alight with such wide-ranging applications as onions that can’t make you cry and therapeutic potential for new treatments for viral infections, cancer and degenerative diseases. But the question remains: How do they work?