Curing HIV remains a dream for now, but it is clearly not a pipe dream. One of the challenges for developing a vaccine is that there is no natural immune response to model such a vaccine on. Over time, an untreated HIV infection will almost certainly kill its host. However, there is a group of elite controllers – people who, although they cannot eliminate the virus, manage to keep it in check.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in oncology, including: USPSTF lowers recommended starting age for lung cancer screening; Suppression of collagen production boosts production of Cxcl5; Immigrants from China face barriers to cancer screening.
In 2020, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was the first medical conference to go virtual, with two days advance warning, when news of infections resulting from a Biogen Inc. conference with about 150 attendees made it abundantly clear that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating, well, probably everywhere.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in neurology, including: AI reveals drugs that may be repurposed for Alzheimer’s disease; Treating Parkinson’s disease symptoms with brain cell grafts; Astrocytes are more inflammatory in bipolar disease; Pain on the brain.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in diagnostics, including: Rapid POC test for respiratory infections may reduce antibiotic use; Risk-stratification tools help conserve ventilator, ICU bed use; Diverse populations, long reads give genome insights; Neurons contribute to their own lack of regeneration.
At the 2021 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, John Greally had some unusual advice with respect to confounders in epigenomic studies. Epigenomics, he told the audience in his talk on "Thinking beyond the creode: epigenomics and human disease," has real promise for understanding genomic mechanisms of disease. "But possibly not in the way we think."
"Nothing is undruggable!" was the bold claim at the European Society of Medical Oncology Targeted Anticancer Therapies Virtual Congress 2021 the (ESMO-TAT).
In the public mind, fat and unhealthy are more or less synonymous. But reality is more complicated, as reality often is. Even among individuals with a BMI of 30 or higher, somewhere between 15% and 45% have metabolism typical of much lower-weight individuals.
Scientists, despite their best efforts, have not been able to identify a way to inhibit the oncoprotein Myc. Uropathogenic Escherichia coli, though, has apparently figured it out. In the Feb. 11, 2021, online issue of Nature Biotechnology, researchers reported that an UPEC-produced protease depleted cellular Myc and improved survival in mouse models of bladder and colon cancer.
