Stories by Christine Gorman

Looking up information about prescription medications used to mean thumbing through the pages of the big blue Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR), or more recently, searching the PDR website.

A new drug combination jump-starts the body’s ability to fight cancer

Widespread antibiotic resistance is no longer a potential problem but has become a major threat, according to the World Health Organization.

What are the likely manufacturing costs for sofosbuvir (Brand name: Sovaldi), the newly approved miracle drug that cures hepatitis C at a cost of $84,000 for the full 12-week course of treatment?

Targeting a microRNA in liver cells could disable a silent killer

In my last blog post, I said one of the things I like so much about MedlinePlus (a service of the National Library of Medicine, or NLM) is that "the medical librarians at the NLM have already done a lot of the heavy lifting for you." I thought I'd give more detail about what I [...]

Being an informed patient is, in many ways, tougher than ever. A tsunami of material is freely available on the Internet nowadays, from medical datasets to research papers to instructive videos.

Long overlooked as a mere cellular housekeeper, RNA has emerged as a path to a new world of medical treatment

Techniques for getting past the immune system are key to safe and effective treatment

Imagine if in the 1960s surgeons like Christiaan Barnard or Norman Shumway had had to use the same rules that govern the development and testing of pharmaceutical medications when they were teaching the rest of the world how to transplant hearts from the recently deceased into their patients.

A new gene-editing technique could lead to more useful animal models of disease, and perhaps one day more effective gene therapy for humans

More bad news for Obamacare and its proponents. A new study from Oregon shows that better access to health care increasedrather than decreasedboth the number of folks crowding emergency rooms and the subset of those who sought care for conditions that clearly were not emergencies.

A few techno-libertarians are up in arms over the FDA’s letter warning the genetics company 23andme to stop selling its personalized genome services kit.

The flawed body mass index remains a useful predictor of health

Researchers believe at least six key things have to go wrong for most tumors to develop

This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was—true to the often-overlooked second half of its name—awarded for discoveries in basic physiology.

On Monday the French government released a declassified report summarizing the evidence that it has gathered about three separate chemical weapons attacks on civilian populations in Syria.

Researchers debate whether hormones or calories play a bigger role in obesity

Not all fat people are metabolically equal. And a simple number like the body mass index (or BMI) does not take that key fact into account.

For years clinicians have puzzled over the observation that people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to develop certain malignancies, such as pancreatic, breast and liver cancers.

  Exercise has always been something of an afterthought for me. Books, not sports, were my passion growing up. But I've also always enjoyed travel, exploring both cities and natural wonders.

So many controversies about stem cells have flared and died away over the past decade that it can be hard to keep track of them all. The most recent contretemps, as evidenced by reports in the scientific press here, here and here, is about an exceedingly rare (and perhaps non-existent) group of diminutive cells called [...]

Although the total number of TB cases is falling worldwide, more dangerous strains appear to be proliferating