At the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego this week, Catherine Woolley’s plenary lecture was an unusual combination of debunking and affirming the importance of sex differences in the brain.

By transplanting a pig kidney into a brain-dead person, researchers have been able to conduct the first long-term study of the physiological processes occurring in both the transplant recipient and the pig organ for 61 days. The findings were published in the Nov. 14, 2025, issue of Nature in two papers – one focusing on physiological and immunological measurements, the other on multiomics.

Researchers from the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and their collaborators have identified adenosine as the driving force behind the rapid, fast-acting antidepressant effects of ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). “Our journey into this area of research began over a decade ago, around 2013, when the clinical world was buzzing with excitement about ketamine's remarkably rapid antidepressant effects,” Minmin Luo, co-senior author of the study, told BioWorld.

South Korean researchers led by Lee In-suk of Yonsei University have reported the most complete oral microbiome catalog to date, with more than 72,000 genomes. Detailed in Cell Host & Microbe on Nov. 12, 2025, the database is expected to serve as a universal platform for academia and enable “precision microbiome medicine” for the industry, Lee told BioWorld.

The industry has been complaining about the drug pricing and reimbursement policies of European governments for years, but only now with the Trump administration’s moves to enforce most favored nation (MFN) pricing and reduce the U.S./EU price gap are governments facing up to the reality that they will have to pay more for new drugs.

The U.K. government has published a road map for phasing out animal testing in life sciences research and announced £75 million (US$98.6 million) for work to develop nonanimal models, leaving scientists concerned because they say, in many cases, there can never be meaningful alternatives to using live animals.

In Alzheimer’s disease, microglia act as a double-edged sword. They can either protect the brain or worsen the damage, depending on their activation state. Inflammatory activation harms healthy neurons. However, a study reveals that a special type of microglia expressing specific receptors and behaving like T cells may help mitigate this neurodegenerative condition.

Enara Bio Ltd. is staking a claim to having validated the first in a new class of tumor antigens derived from unannotated regions of the dark genome, describing its findings in talks and posters being presented at the Society of Immunotherapy in Cancer (SITC) meeting in National Harbor, Md., Nov. 5-9, 2025.

Despite the formidable challenges for developing precision psychiatry, the approach is notching its first successes in the preclinical and even some clinical settings. Many individual studies as well as large projects like the Psychiatric Ratings using Intermediate Markers studies and the Psychiatric Biomarkers Network have been looking at multiple biomarker types, and have begun to identify predictors of specific symptoms, or disease progression.