LONDON – Researchers have pinpointed a little-studied gene as responsible for doubling the risk of respiratory failure in COVID-19 and shown exactly how it exerts its effect. The gene, leucine zipper transcription factor like 1, is activated by a single base pair change on chromosome 3 that occurs in 60% of people of South Asian ancestry and 15% of people of European ancestry.

Investigators at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have used a new mouse model of Parkinson’s disease to confirm a causal role for mitochondrial dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease. More surprisingly, the same model has called into question previously uncontroversial notions about the motor features that are PD’s most conspicuous feature.

A comprehensive nontargeted metabolomics analysis has revealed previously unknown classes of disease-linked metabolites in whole blood samples from dementia patients, which may have significant therapeutic implications for managing the untreatable common cognitive disorder.

In infectious disease research, most of the research into genetic determinants of susceptibility to infection and disease severity are focused on the host. For COVID-19, for example, the delta variant’s infectivity, and how likely infection is to lead to severe disease, is the focus of an intense research agenda. But host genetics, too, contribute to the consequences of infections. An ongoing study into the host genetics of SARS-CoV-2 infection has identified 13 such factors that affected either the likelihood of contracting SARS-CoV-2, or the severity of disease, gleaned from the data of 50,000 infected persons and 2 million controls.

Sometimes, scientific progress comes from conceptual insights that arrive in a flash. More often, however, such progress arrives in a decidedly less glamorous, though no less important, manner.

Researchers from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University said they have used two-dimensional nanosheets to develop a biomimetic nanosheet that can monitor tumor development, treat tumors and monitor the treatment progress in real-time.

At the 2021 virtual annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), results of the VISION trial testing the addition of Novartis AG’s radiopharmaceutical Lutetium-177-PSMA-617 (Lutetium-PSMA) to individualized standard-of-care regimens in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer improved both overall survival and radiographic progression-free survival.

Roughly a year and a half after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many unknowns remain about the future of the virus. How it will mutate, how long protection from either illness or vaccination will last, when it will cease to be a pandemic and instead be endemic, even whether the worst is still ahead. And there is also an increasing acknowledgment that there remain unknowns about SARS-CoV-2’s past.

Using advanced intravital microscopy to visualize immune cell movement within the tissues, investigators at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne have discovered that noradrenaline causes a dramatic paralysis of immune cell movement.