Chinese scientists have shown for the first time that the down-regulation of a single RNA-binding protein, polypyrimidine tract-binding protein 1 (Ptbp1), locally converted glial cells to neurons and showed promise for treating the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases in mice.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Engineering better bacterial backstabbers; Targeting bystander protein improves sepsis outcome; Long noncoding RNA has sex-specific role in depression; Targeted IL-12 heats up cold tumors; Fast route from fibroblasts to photoreceptors; Eating pro-inflammatory IgG helps prevent liver failure; Depression’s structural problem; Modeling the post-infarct heart; Interleukins rile each other up in reaction to implants; Complement links high BMI to dementia.

The largest study to date on hypermutated gliomas has delivered new insights into their origin, as well as their response to several different treatments. Specifically, even though they are hypermutated, such tumors are unlikely to respond to PD-1 blockers.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Exosomes deliver sepsis treatment; Dopamine has epigenetic role in addiction; Rejuvenating inflammation’s end; Gut repair with an iron will; Multiple drivers explained.

“Vaccines, obviously, are the ultimate solution for pandemics,” Rino Rappuoli told BioWorld. They have, he added, “already eliminated a lot of pandemic threats – smallpox, influenza, poliomyelitis.” And the road to normalcy from the current pandemic, or any pandemic, is likely to be open only once there is a vaccine.

Specific therapies against a new disease take time to develop. But there are methods that can speed up that development – and in the meantime, there are ways to make do with what’s already in the cupboard.

There will be lessons learned aplenty when the COVID-19 pandemic finally breaks, including how serological and molecular testing can be used to maximum effect to corral a future pandemic. Carmen Wiley, president of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry, told BioWorld that the existing instrument types are up to the job, but that surge capacity is needed, and that it is not clear how the cost of that capacity will be handled.

“In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again... The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.” So wrote Bill Gates in a February editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine about COVID-19, which “has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Microbiome changes precede tumor development in CRC; Converting catch and release to PARP traps; Smart bacterium senses environment; The dose makes the poison – timing, too; Minimal phenotyping gives minimal insights into MDD genetics; Hypoxia linked to common form of muscular dystrophy; Stopping tau in its tracks; Optogenetic plaque model traces neurodegeneration in AD; Once repulsive, always repulsive.

COVID-19 has disrupted science in the way it has disrupted everything else. In the short term, universities have largely closed shop as a way to maximize social distancing, and lots of science – or at least, lots of bench work – is not getting done.