“I am not a fortune teller, nor am I a gambler. I will make no bets,” Lorraine Kalia told the audience at the 2023 International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders. “But I am optimistic.” At the meeting, which is being held in Copenhagen this week, Kalia, who is a scientist at Toronto Western Hospital’s Krembil Brain Institute and at the University of Toronto’s Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases, was giving an overview of “Emerging targets in the clinic” in a plenary session on “Therapeutic strategies for the future.”

KRAS-mutated tumors were once untreatable. In fact, KRAS was something of a poster child for so-called undruggability. Several laboratories are investigating strategies to address other mutations and uses beyond non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and colorectal cancer. If you can't bind KRAS to block it, use a glue or combine multiple weapons. This is the idea behind two new approaches that target cancers caused by this proto-oncogene.

A newly discovered antibiotic has been shown to block the synthesis of bacterial cell walls via immutable targets, raising the prospect of a class of drugs that will not lose effect through the development of antimicrobial resistance. Clovibactin, isolated from soil bacteria, targets the cell wall precursor molecules lipid II, lipid III and undecaprenyl phosphate (C55PP), all of which have a pyrophosphate group in common.

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.

Scientists have discovered that a small chemokine protein released by activated platelets, platelet factor 4 (PF 4), reduced neuroinflammation, and improved cognition in aged mice. The study was published on Aug. 16 in the online edition of Nature.

In brain research, be it basic or clinical, neurons have long hogged the limelight. But at the 2023 European Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease, neurons take a back seat to glia – cell types that have often been described as support cells and treated as an afterthought, but that play critical roles in all aspects of brain function, including information processing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to entice. On the exhibition floor at the 2023 Congress of the European Academy of Neurology, one company’s booth featured “Mindart” technology. A passersby could answer a short series of prompts, and get a unique image based on the input made by generative AI. Entertainment aside, medically speaking, AI applications “are still research,” Riccardo Soffietti told his audience at one of several sessions devoted to AI. “But obviously, research is the future.”

The development of an embryo in its early stages involves a series of processes in which cells interact and organize to form tissues. In humans, these stages are studied with animal models, stem cells and cell aggregates that mimic natural development phases, or with human embryos, depending on their availability and a strict protocol. Now, in back-to-back papers published online in Nature, scientists from Yale University and the University of Cambridge have two new embryonic models formed from human stem cells to study development after embryo implantation in the uterus.

Back-to-back papers in the June 22, 2023, issue of Nature have identified separate molecular mechanisms underlying sex-specific cancer outcomes. Researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that increased expression of the epigenetic enzyme KDM5D, which is located on the Y chromosome, contributed to cancer progression in KRAS-mutated tumors. In the same issue of Nature, a team from Cedars-Sinai reported new insights into the consequences of losing the entire Y chromosome.