BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: See in 3D; Tolerizing DCs are made, not born; GOF, LOF mutations take different paths to same result; NEFA’s nefarious role in pancreatitis; Comprehensive look identifies insulin autoantigens.

CYBERSPACE – Continuing improvements in HIV treatment and progress toward a cure notwithstanding, an effective vaccine will be necessary to gain the upper hand in the decades-long fight against the pandemic.

With Friday’s last-minute decision to move to an all-virtual format, the opening session of the 2020 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was certainly an unusual one. “We are in uncharted waters,” conference co-chair Sharon Hillier, Richard Sweet Professor of Reproductive Infectious Disease at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told the audience via livestream.

In the Marvel Comic Universe, Venom is a superhero who started life as a supervillain and Spiderman foe. In the biopharma universe, scorpion venom is undergoing the same fate transformation, as separate papers this week reported new ways to use scorpion venom in two major therapeutic targeting challenges.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Serine improves memory in Alzheimer’s mouse model; From junk to noncoding to coding; Keeping stem cells quiescent enables greater ultimate potency; Female, male fat tissue flight inflammation differently; BioPROTACs cut out middleman, and small molecule; ‘Gut bug’ has intratumoral effects; Decoy exosomes fight bacterial toxin; Unexpected mechanism, combination possibilities for CDK 4/6 inhibitors; In SIV infection, gut integrity is retained, not repaired.

Lowering levels of tau protein improved multiple symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in two different mouse models of the disease, both of which are driven by hyperactivity of the mTOR PI3 kinase pathway.