The vast variety of tumors makes each cancer a world. For researchers, understanding the commonalities and divergences in their molecular underpinnings could help find successful treatments. Scientists from the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) have addressed these similarities and differences in 10 different types of cancer with two proteogenomic studies to unravel the genes that lead to cancer and the galaxy of interactions that regulate them.
The study of six types of mental illnesses in a thousand brain regions has demonstrated the differences between individuals within each disorder. Using magnetic resonance images (MRI), scientists from Monash University in Australia analyzed the brain changes and built individual maps for each psychiatric disorder. Their results revealed differences between people with the same diagnosis, which could help refine assessments.
A new drug that inhibits the glutamate carboxypeptidase II (GCPII) enzyme could be used to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to a new study in mice and human organoids. After decades of research trying to design GCPII inhibitors against neurological disorders, the new compound could be effective for another use.
How severe a viral infection is depends on how much the virus is replicating, damaging cells as it does so, and on the response of the immune system. Or so one would think. “Some of the most severe cases of COVID-19 are happening in the absence of replicating virus,” Joseph Guarnieri told BioWorld. In work published in Science Translational Medicine on Aug. 9, 2023, Guarnieri and his colleagues have described how those severe cases unfold, even as there is no replicating virus to be found.
A different class of antibiotics could ease the increasing resistance triggered by some gram-negative bacteria. LpxC inhibitors are not new, but all attempts to develop them have failed due to cardiovascular toxicity or ineffectiveness. A modification of the structure of these compounds may have solved the problem. Duke University scientists demonstrated the preclinical safety and efficacy of an LpxC inhibitor candidate against a wide selection of these pathogens.
It has gone unnoticed in HIV research until now, but a transcriptomic analysis has detected a molecule that could kill this virus. Scientists at a U.S. military research institute laboratory have found a common factor in human cells that inhibited the replication of HIV-1 in people living with the virus. “Without any manipulation of cells in people with HIV, we have found a host factor that is inhibiting HIV in vivo,” the senior author Rasmi Thomas, chief of the Laboratory of Integrative Multiomics at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told BioWorld. Using single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), the study published on Aug. 2, 2023, in Science Translational Medicine identified this host factor as prothymosin α, a protein isolated from the thymus in 1966 and described in 1984.
CAR T-cell immunotherapy is designed with different targets depending on the receptors they will bind to. CARs can also contain different tools, like the concept of a Swiss army knife, with several utensils for different tasks. The goal is to make them more effective and durable. During the second session of the Spotlight on Immuno-Oncology conference, “Novel CAR designs and approaches,” Robbie Majzner, of Stanford University, described expanding the main components of CAR T cells to acquire new functions and act on different cell pathways.
“From such a stick, such a splinter,” is a popular Spanish saying to explain how a son resembles his father. Like father, like son. The first Spotlight on Immuno-Oncology conference of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) is the splinter of the ASGCT annual meeting, which brought together a group of experts in this field. It took place on Aug. 1 and 2, 2023, starting with a series of talks on “B Cell Malignancies and Beyond.”
A receptor could hold the key to explaining how stress affects behavior, at least under certain circumstances. Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have described how childhood neglect or abuse altered the brain. Stress glucocorticoid hormones caused neuronal damage in mice by increasing the receptor tyrosine kinase MERTK in astrocytes and inducing them to phagocytose excitatory synapses.
Colonization of the stomach by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori can cause gastric cancer by secreting the CagA oncoprotein. Now, a Japanese laboratory has discovered that CagA disrupted Wnt/PCP signaling and altered the polarity in which the squamous cells of the developing gastric epithelium are arranged, causing the hyperproliferation of the stem cells.
