LONDON – Six weeks on from the initial alert, “the window of opportunity” to control the COVID-19 epidemic is “narrowing,” according to the latest assessment from World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Noncoding RNA protects blood vessel walls; PD-1 blockade interferes with opioid analgesia; T-cell population is biomarker for beta cell function; Glutaminase 1 is NASH target; Oligodendrocyte-neural connections not just about myelin; Sharper look yields new potential kinase target in ovarian cancer; Structural insights could enable specific activation of GPCRs; Autophagy activation may prevent metastasis; AI finds structurally unique antibiotics.

Beyond every binary is a more complex reality. And so it is with driver and passenger mutations. The separation of tumor mutations into drivers and passengers underpins much progress in the development of targeted therapies. By looking at passenger mutations more carefully, though, researchers at Yale University have shown that passenger mutations, too, played a role in how tumors progressed.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder. But not just. And it may not start that way. There is increasing evidence that a-synuclein, the protein whose aggregates eventually destroy midbrain dopaminergic neurons in PD (and that are the cause of other diseases collectively known as the synucleinopathies), first aggregates “in enteric neurons, the neurons that control gastrointestinal function,” Collin Challis told BioWorld.

SEATTLE – As it enters its third year, the Human Cell Atlas project has mapped 100 million of 100 billion cells, and by comparing gene expression profiles of normal and aberrant cells and building networks of cellular interactions, is leading to breakthroughs in understanding of disease at a molecular level.

SEATTLE – Tracing the family tree of COVID-19 through its evolving DNA sequence makes it possible to disprove many false claims circulating on social media about the novel coronavirus, and, in particular, that it was generated in a covert biological weapons program. “From everything I’ve looked at, there is zero evidence for genetic engineering; it looks like normal evolution,” said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who has been using genomes sequences taken from patient samples to track the spread of the virus since Jan. 11.