The easiest explanation for the funding woes of women's health is that women are women and venture capitalists are primarily men. But the aphorism that "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong," sometimes ascribed to Mark Twain and sometimes to H.L Mencken, applies.

From a medical perspective, women's sexual and reproductive health is a conundrum. Health care for women of reproductive age includes the possibility of affecting fertility; meanwhile, treating pregnant women means treating two people, whose physiologies differ and whose best interests can be at odds with each other.

Patent protection for drugs hinges on protecting the molecules themselves in composition-of-matter patents. But its structure is only one aspect of a drug that can be protected by patents. Another possibility is to patent the chemical pathway to that structure via composition patents. Pathways, plural, actually – pretty much any compound can be synthesized via multiple routes. The patents around Merck & Co. Inc.'s Januvia (sitagliptin), for example, include more than 400 intermediates, and more than 450 unique reactions.

Researchers from the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have demonstrated that a normally intracellular peptidase, when administered systemically, bound to the extracellular domain of both HER2 and EGFR, and was effective at killing tumor cells in mouse models of HER2-driven breast cancers. 

Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco have gained new insights into how driver mutations, separately and together, affect tumors' evasion of immunosurveillance. 

The engineered protein 3K3A-APC, a variant of activated protein C, is in clinical trials for stroke and has demonstrated neuroprotective effects in animal models of other neurological diseases as well. Now, researchers from the University of Southern California have found that 3K3A-APC was effective at preventing behavioral deficits and neuronal damage in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Researchers from the University of Washington and Stanford University have used bioinformatics to develop proteins that bound to specific forms of the interleukin-2 (IL-2) receptor, but otherwise had no structural similarity to IL-2.