SAN DIEGO – "Wherever I look, I see the ugly face of complement." That, complement researcher Jörg Köhl told the audience at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association of Immunologists (AAI), was the comment of a research colleague who repeatedly stumbled across complement contributions to what had once seemed unrelated research.
SAN DIEGO – Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 28, 2009, Steven Rosenberg was the first person to treat a patient with CAR T cells. That patient, a 48-year-old construction worker with metastatic non-Hodgkin lymphoma, is now 58 and remains in remission, as well as working full time. Two CAR T-cell therapies have been approved, and more than 1,000 patients have been treated with them.
Researchers at Pisa's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and King's College London have shown that therapeutic administration of miR-199 stimulated cardiac repair in pigs after experimentally induced heart attacks.
PHILADELPHIA – "Because of our assumption that structure determines function, for a long time [low-complexity domains] were not considered important," J. Paul Taylor told the audience at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting's Frontiers in Neuroscience plenary session. Such low-complexity domains (LCDs) were thought of as junk parts of proteins, in analogy to junk DNA.
PHILADELPHIA – "We've gone from no randomized controlled trial to three," Sean Pittock told reporters at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting this week. "It's a glorious example of what you can do with precision medicine."
Researchers have discovered that the synaptic protein Bassoon accumulated in the neurons of mice with experimental autoimmune encephalitis, the closest animal model to multiple sclerosis (MS), causing neuronal damage in much the same way that protein aggregates damage neurons in neurodegenerative diseases.
PHILADELPHIA – Data presented at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) meeting this week on experimental therapeutics for Huntington's disease gave some cause for optimism. And, as good research does, they identified new questions as they answered current ones.
Researchers have linked the hormone oxytocin, which stimulates social and pair bonding, to the increased risk of aortic tear in women with Marfan syndrome.
"The molecular genetics for APP" – amyloid precursor protein – "still unequivocally demonstrate that APP and Abeta are crucial for disease pathogenesis" in Alzheimer's disease (AD), Carlo Condello told BioWorld.
