Latest Research in Cambridge

The Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Heart and Lung Research Institute is a thriving community of scientists and clinicians, the largest concentration of its kind in Europe, focused on tackling the world's biggest killers.

Researchers have mapped the spread of infectious diseases in humans across millennia, to reveal how human-animal interactions permanently transformed our health today.

A teenager who has lost family members including her mother because of a rare genetic hereditary illness has become the first patient in the UK and Europe to have a new treatment developed by Cambridge researchers and approved for use on the NHS.

A teenager who has lost family members including her mother because of a rare genetic hereditary illness has become the first patient in the UK and Europe to have a new treatment developed by Cambridge researchers and approved for use on the NHS.

The placenta and the hormones it produces may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, while also leading to the behavioural traits that have made human societies able to thrive and expand, according to a new hypothesis proposed by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

Before the ‘Out of Africa’ migration that led our ancestors into Eurasia and beyond, human populations learned to adapt to new and challenging habitats including African forests and deserts, which was key to the long-term success of our species’ dispersal.

Eleven senior researchers at the University of Cambridge have been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council – the highest number of grants awarded to any institution in this latest funding round.

Research finds that appetite for bushmeat – rather than the black market for scales to use in traditional Chinese medicine – may be driving West Africa’s illegal hunting of one of the world’s most threatened mammals.

Researchers have found that chunks of ‘flipped’ DNA can help fish quickly adapt to new habitats and evolve into new species, acting as evolutionary ‘superchargers’.

Two groups involving researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences are among nine teams to have been awarded funding today from the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA)’s Synthetic Plants programme.

Four Cambridge biomedical and health researchers are among those announced today as newly-elected Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Researchers in Cambridge are calling for additional scans to be added to breast screening for women with very dense breasts. This follows a large-scale trial, which shows that extra scans could treble cancer detection for these women potentially saving up to 700 lives a year in the UK.

Nine outstanding Cambridge scientists have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences and the oldest science academy in continuous existence.

A combination of two drugs could improve outcomes and reduce the need for toxic chemotherapy for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL), the commonest cancer in childhood and one that can be particularly difficult to treat in older patients, according to Cambridge scientists.

By tying together more than a century of memory research at Cambridge, the Memory Lab gives us tangible ways to improve, preserve and understand our memory.

A new treatment approach significantly improves survival rates for patients with aggressive, inherited breast cancers, according to Cambridge researchers.

Women diagnosed with breast cancer who carry particular BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic variants are offered surgery to remove the ovaries and fallopian tubes as this dramatically reduces their risk of ovarian cancer. Now, Cambridge researchers have shown that this procedure – known as bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) – is associated with a substantial reduction in the risk of early death among these women, without any serious side-effects.

A majority of individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss face significant communication barriers when accessing care through the National Health Service (NHS), with nearly two-thirds of patients missing half or more of vital information shared during appointments.

Findings from a major Cambridge-led study inspired psychologists to co-produce a picture book that helps parents develop a deeper understanding of how their child is coping with the first year of school.