LONDON – The international commission convened in the aftermath of Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s shock announcement of the birth of gene edited twins has set a possible course to approval of heritable gene editing, but said the technique is far from ready for use.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Killing persisters with less toxicity.

The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, a multiyear, multi-institutional attempt to catalog how expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) and splicing quantitative trait loci (sQTL) affect protein levels, reported data from its final phase in 15 papers in the Sept, 10, 2020, online issues of the Science and Cell family of journals, as well as in Genome Biology.

A new type of SARS-CoV-2 antigen test that relies on single molecule array technology may be able to help clinicians identify which patients are most likely to experience severe disease.

According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the U.S. It is also a leading cause of drug failure in clinical trials. Now, researchers have used liver organoids to develop a polygenic risk score that could predict the risk of liver toxicity for multiple different drugs, regardless of the underlying mechanism.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Angiopoietin trouble can lead to lymphedema; Toxicity, infectivity separate issues for prion protein.

An Australian study led by University of Melbourne scientists has identified a previously unknown role for the hepatokine, sparc-related modular calcium-binding protein 1 (SMOC1), in suppressing hepatic glucose production.