Meet Lil’ Poundcake, “the first doll approved to administer the human papillomavirus vaccination to girls under ten”.

If she sounds like the bizarre-twisted creation of a comic’s mind, she is. A skit in this weekend’s Saturday Night Live — no doubt in response to the recent controversy over human papillomavirus immunization stirred by a Republican presidential debate in the US — imagines this doll, which will definitely not be the must-have gift this Christmas . “Lil’ Poundcake protects against HPV with a series of three injections over a period of six months AND she’s got her own phone.” Creepy!

Earlier this month, the European Medicines Agency approved Boehringer Ingelheim’s blood-thinner drug Pradaxa (dabigatran) as a stroke prevention treatment in people with a cardiac arrhythmia condition known as atrial fibrillation. The clot-prevention agent, which gained US approval last October, is the first replacement to the anticoagulation standby warfarin to be green-lighted for this disease in 50 years — but it’s probably not the last.

Next month, a panel of experts convened by the US Food and Drug Administration will consider whether Bayer and Johnson & Johnson’s Xarelto (rivaroxaban), currently approved in the EU, US and Canada to prevent blood clots in people having hip and knee replacement surgeries, should be used to treat atrial fibrillation. And later this month, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer will present data at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Paris showing that their Eliquis (apixaban) — currently also approved in the EU for post-surgery treatment — is better and safer than warfarin for the same indication.

With annual sales of stroke prevention drugs expected to reach $14 billion by 2017, these new medicines could become big earners. Here, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery presents a video outlining the half-century quest to bring these agents to market.

One of my general “rules for living a healthy life” is to stay as far away from bears as possible — not to mention their bile. But many mainstream doctors disagree and use a synthetic version of a bear bile component, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), to treat heart attacks, liver disorders and gallstones. A new rat study published today in Hepatology adds to this list; it offers insight into how the synthetic form of UDCA can slow the flow of electricity within fetal hearts, presenting a potential treatment for arrhythmia.

UDCA is currently used in Western medicine to treat the blockage of bile flow from the liver during pregnancy, a condition known as intrahepatic cholestasis, even though doctors don’t know how it works. “Historically people treated liver diseases with Chinese medicine preparations” of bear bile, says paper author Julia Gorelik of Imperial College London. Eventually doctors identified UDCA as the active ingredient in the bile, “but the mechanism wasn’t known,” she says.

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A credit card–sized device can accurately and cheaply diagnose infectious diseases in the developing world, researchers reported online yesterday in Nature Medicine. Watch this video to learn how the device performed in preliminary field testing in Rwanda.

Korean scientists have identified a connection between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a small error in a specific gene. The discovery, published online this week in Nature Medicine, could pave the way for new drugs to treat ADHD, a condition that affects an estimated 5% of school-aged children, making it hard for them to learn.

“This could become a springboard now to study the molecular pathways that cause ADHD in humans,” Huda Zoghbi, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who was not involved in the study, told Nature Medicine.

Several genome-wide scans had recently pointed to chromosome 17 as a hotspot for candidate genes linked to ADHD, but none of these studies had zeroed in on any specific gene targets in this region. So Eunjoon Kim and his colleagues from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, turned their sights to one such a gene on the short arm of the chromosome encoding the G protein–coupled receptor kinase–interacting protein-1 (GIT1). Researchers had previously linked GIT1 to many cellular functions, including receptor internalization, focal adhesion and cell signaling, but had never implicated the protein in ADHD.

Kim’s team knocked out the GIT1 gene in mice and saw that the animals were more active and displayed impaired learning and memory in a series of behavioral tests. They then validated the findings in people by examining the gene’s sequence in close to 400 Korean children, half of whom were diagnosed with ADHD. They found that a single nucleotide difference was nearly three times as common among youngsters affected by the condition.

“The human results will be useful in the diagnosis of ADHD, and GIT1 knockout mice may be used in exploring the underlying mechanisms and developing novel ADHD medications,” Kim wrote in an email.

In the following video, you can watch as a GIT1 knockout mouse feverishly paces around its cage, with a normal mouse displayed in the cage below for comparison. Also, be sure to check out our video of a mouse model of obsessive compulsive disorder.

You may be more familiar with Mark Zuckerberg than David Lipman. But Lipman — who has directed the US National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland for the past 22 years — may have had a more revolutionary impact than the Facebook founder on the way scientists interact by creating the ultimate network for biomedical research: PubMed.

In this following spoof of The Social Network, students from Imperial College London’s Scientific Communication program retell the story of how PubMed began.

Elizabeth Taylor was many things to many people: a screen legend, a social activist, a fashion icon and so much more. But to Abbott Laboratories, the Chicago-based pharmaceutical company, Taylor was also one of nearly 300 study subjects enrolled in the Endovascular Valve Edge-to-Edge REpair Study (EVEREST II), a clinical trial testing an experimental medical device called MitraClip.

In 2009, Taylor, who died yesterday from congestive heart failure at the age of 79, divulged via Twitter that she had received MitraClip, a repair system for treating leaky heart valves. Ted Feldman, a cardiologist at Northshore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois who is leading the EVEREST II trial, told heartwire that he had not been involved in Taylor’s care and didn’t know the details of her treatment. But, he wrote in an email, “our high-risk registry did show decreased rehospitalizations and improved survival for the year after treatment, which may be the case for her.”

Earlier this week, Feldman and his colleagues reported on the healing response of 67 people who received the MitraClip. They found that tissue bridging between the device arms added structural stability to the valve and that the device maintained its mechanical integrity for up five years after implantation. Feldman is slated to announce two-year results from the EVEREST II trial next month at the American College of Cardiology’s annual Scientific Sessions/i2 Summit.

Below you can watch a video in which Feldman describes the experimental technology:

Two new papers in Nature this week — one from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany and the other from a collaborative effort between researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon — provide a stunning view into how brain cells communicate. Seeing is believing, as this video demonstrates.