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.
Blocking progesterone receptor (PR) activity has long been viewed as a possible approach to breast cancer prevention. Historically, most supporting evidence came from animal models, epidemiological studies or mechanistic pathway analyses. Now, a team at the University of Manchester has uncovered direct mechanistic and clinical evidence that PR antagonists can reprogram the breast tissue microenvironment, suggesting a novel avenue for reducing breast cancer risk in women.
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.
Not quite a newco, Alethio Therapeutics has emerged from a period of introspection with new management and a refreshed vision of how best to translate its roots in the biology of chronic, untreatable blood cancers into meaningful therapies.
Psychiatry has struggled to enter the precision medicine era. But through a mix of innovations and bootstrapping, progress is coming to the field. Scientists are working on improving diagnoses by investigating potential biomarkers and collection methods.
At the AACR-NCI-ORTC conference, researchers from Dewpoint Therapeutics Inc. presented advances in targeting MYC condensates, revealing a potential breakthrough strategy for treating cancers driven by MYC – a well-established oncogenic driver that is frequently overexpressed or amplified across a range of human cancers.
Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) live year-round in the icy or near-icy waters of the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Although they migrate with the seasonal cycles of ice formation and melting, they never reach the warmer waters visited by other large marine mammals. Their adaptation to low temperatures may have also enabled them to live longer and avoid cancer, a disease closely linked to aging.
Stem cells are a promising therapeutic modality to fight aging and age-related disease, speakers at the Bio-Plus Interphex Korea 2025 said. Progress in cell-based longevity medicine is being made, they added, although safety, ethical and regulatory issues are ongoing challenges.
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