Health Sciences cancer prevention expert Cynthia Thomson, PhD, shares updated guidance that could save lives, including new advice on food and alcohol.

An article looks into the challenges of widely distributing a COVID-19 vaccine in Arizona. "The FDA has promised that it is not going to approve a vaccine until it has found to be safe," said Dr. Elizabeth Connick, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

Dr. Meredith Hay won a $5.7 million grant for clinical trials on a novel peptide therapy that, if successful, would be the first drug to treat vascular dementia – the second most common form of dementia.

The convergence of the flu season and the COVID-19 pandemic calls for vigilance with masks, handwashing, social distancing – and a flu shot.

Continuing coverage: Investigators have determined that treating patients with an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration with levodopa, a safe and readily available drug commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease, stabilized and improved their vision. It reduced the number of treatments necessary to maintain vision, and as such, will potentially reduce the burden of treating the disease, financially and otherwise. Dr. Robert W. Snyder, head of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of the Arizona, is the study's lead investigator.

Continuing coverage: Molecular clock analysis showed no widespread community distribution of the highly contagious coronavirus disease in Arizona until mid-February.

Continuing coverage: Colleges and universities across the U.S. are looking into using wastewater-based epidemiology to track the spread of COVID-19. Wastewater samples from the Likins dorm on the University of Arizona campus came back positive for COVID-19, according to University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. Ian Pepper, director of the WEST Center and a BIO5 Institute member, is leading a study that uses municipal wastewater to monitor the incidence of the virus in communities across the United States.

Labs and factories around the globe are racing to test and produce more than a billion doses of coronavirus vaccine. To shrink a 10-year marathon into a 10-month sprint, they are merging institutional knowledge with novel bioscience methods. "This first round of vaccines is certainly using more of what we would call experimental platforms – things that don't have a lot of track record yet," said Deepta Bhattacharya, a cell biologist and immunologist at the University of Arizona. "Now, that's not to say that it won't work. And to be honest, all of the early data that I'm seeing so far, it looks really quite promising."