A team led by researchers at the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research division of New York’s Northwell Health, developed a long-term implant model for vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) in mice that enables study of bioelectronics in chronic disease. The research was published in Elife, with a full description of the surgical technique and methods for calibrating the stimulation dose to enable other labs to use the methods to advance bioelectronic medicine.

Researchers from Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. presented early clinical data for SEP-363856, a novel trace amine receptor 1 agonist with serotonin 5-HT1A activity, being developed for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia.

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, have used a newly developed single-cell clonal multiomics technique to gain a better understanding of the genetic programming underlying how stem cells differentiate into particular cell types.

Chinese neuroscientists have identified a bone marrow (BM) response to acute brain injury, in which the fate and function of BM hematopoietic cells are shaped by brain injury, suggesting that the brain can mobilize a population of protective monocytes and direct them to the injury site.

Organoids cultured from patient-derived colorectal cancer cells have been used to demonstrate for the first time that tumors which have developed resistance to the full range of existing treatments, across chemotherapies, targeted therapies and immunotherapies, retain a requirement for Werner helicase (WRN) for survival. WRN has a key role in the maintenance of genome stability, but although loss of WRN is known to initiate synthetic lethality in DNA mismatch repair deficient colorectal cancer, studies into the effect of inhibiting that helicase have to date been limited to a handful of cell lines.