In 2021, Ardem Patapoutian won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the mechanosensitive receptors Piezo1 and Piezo2. The receptors, which are ion channels that respond to mechanical pressure, are important in touch sensation, as well as regulating processes including bladder control and blood pressure. Now, investigators at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, and Central South University’s Xiangya Hospital have discovered a decidedly ignoble role for Piezo2.
Diwali, the Festival of Light, marks different events depending on where it is celebrated. In some areas of India, it marks the return of Lord Rama to his birthplace of Ayodhya after defeating the demon Ravana.
Circuit dysfunction is clearly recognized as a driver of neuropsychiatric disease, and some neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. And at the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) 2022 Congress, researchers made an argument that the same is true in multiple sclerosis (MS). Such a lens could explain the radiological-clinical paradox between the amount of structural damage and clinical severity.
Diwali, the Festival of Light, marks different events depending on where it is celebrated. In some areas of India, it marks the return of Lord Rama to his birthplace of Ayodhya after defeating the demon Ravana. For Vivek Subbiah, associate professor at the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics, Division of Cancer Medicine of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the story of how Rama defeated Ravana has parallels in drug discovery. Ravana had 10 heads, and when one was cut off, it grew back. Rama defeated Ravana by means of a magic arrow that entered through the demon’s navel.
Based on an analysis of critical transcription factors, researchers have stratified rheumatoid arthritis (RA) into two subtypes where gene expression was driven by RAR-α or TGF-β, respectively. The findings, published in Nature Communications on Oct. 20, 2022, by researchers from the University of California, San Diego, give new insights into factors that affect the treatment response in RA, and could point to novel treatment strategies.
As they matured from prenatal to adult, heart cells reduced the number of nuclear pores by more than 60%. That decrease protected them from the consequences of stress, but also impaired their ability to regenerate. “These findings are an important advance in fundamental understanding of how the heart develops with age and how it has evolved to cope with stress,” senior author Bernhard Kühn, professor of pediatrics and director of the Pediatric Institute for Heart Regeneration and Therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said in a press release. Kühn and his colleagues published those findings in the Oct. 24, 2022, issue of Developmental Cell.
There is little doubt that progress in many brain diseases is being hampered because many, maybe most, diagnostic categories do not reflect underlying brain processes. In other disease areas, modern genetic and genomic methods have arrived in the form of approved drugs, from KRAS inhibitors in cancer to PCSK9 inhibitors to lower cholesterol. But brain diseases are different. Psychiatry is simultaneously the most personal area of medicine, and the least precise.
Disrupted meiosis, the cell division process that leads to the production of reproductive cells in sexually reproducing organisms, led to a decline in overall health by triggering an accelerating aging signature in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.
The work is “the first direct evidence that manipulating the health of reproductive cells leads to premature aging and a decline in healthspan,” senior author Arjumand Ghazi, an associate professor of pediatrics, developmental biology, and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Children’s Hospital, said in a press release.
At first blush, to say that depression occurs with other diseases may seem like belaboring the obvious. After all, to put it in the bluntest possible terms, it’s sad to be sick. But by looking more closely, it soon becomes clear that the association is stronger than that. The strongest association between depression and other diseases, Stefan Gold told the audience at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual conference in Vienna this week, is “not necessarily the most severe or most immediately life-threatening disorders… [it’s] across the spectrum."
Psychiatric animal models are a challenge by their nature. Whether a drug is blocking tumor growth in a rodent is easy enough to measure, although still hard to translate. But how does one figure out what a mouse is thinking? Actually, one doesn’t. There is “no way in heck I’m going to claim that I can model a thought disorder in rodents, so forget about that,” Bita Moghaddam told her audience at the opening keynote of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual conference this weekend. But other aspects of mental disorders, she argued, can be usefully modeled.
