Synthetic biology is seeing rapid advances, but the medical applications have thus far remained largely elusive. But now researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a tool that can track specific populations of bacteria in the gut of living organisms and document population changes over time.

Australian researchers have developed the first potent new small-molecule inhibitors capable of blocking the activation of apoptotic cell death before it causes damage to mitochondria, they reported in a study published in the Oct. 7, 2019, issue of Nature Chemical Biology. Those first-in-class inhibitors will be useful tools for evaluating the mechanisms underlying apoptosis, assessing the impact of the pharmacological blockade of apoptosis in experimental models and potentially have multiple clinical indications.

Researchers from Columbia University have demonstrated that correcting mutations in the schizophrenia risk gene SetD1 in adult mice reversed cognitive impairments, suggesting that, like a number of other brain disorders, schizophrenia's malfunctions begin in early development, but remain in place via ongoing active processes rather than reaching a point of no return. 

Synthetic biology is seeing rapid advances, but the medical applications have thus far remained largely elusive. But now researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a tool that can track specific populations of bacteria in the gut of living organisms and document population changes over time.

Australian researchers have developed the first potent new small-molecule inhibitors capable of blocking the activation of apoptotic cell death before it causes damage to mitochondria, they reported in a study published in the Oct. 7, 2019, issue of Nature Chemical Biology.

There's a yin and yang to neoantigens, Alberto Bardelli told the audience at the 2019 annual conference of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Barcelona, Spain, last month. They contribute to tumorigenesis, resistance and tumor heterogeneity. But they are also often specific to tumor cells but not normal cells and "some," he said, "are actionable targets."

There’s a yin and yang to neoantigens, Alberto Bardelli told the audience at the 2019 annual conference of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Barcelona, Spain, last month.

LONDON – A paper that raised concerns for the future health of Lulu and Nana, the world's first gene edited babies, has been fully retracted at the request of the authors, after they failed to identify a problem in data from the U.K. Biobank on which their analysis was based.

William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe, and Gregg Semenza have jointly won the 2019 Nobel Prize "for their discoveries of how cells sense oxygen," the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced today.

The emerging methodology of federated learning can overcome many of the ethical and privacy obstacles preventing patient data from being pooled for analysis, according to research published this week. French-American artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Owkin Inc. has demonstrated the technique can be used to apply machine learning to datasets held at different clinical centers. In a paper published in the Oct. 7 online edition of Nature Medicine, they describe how that generated new insights into the histopathology of malignant mesothelioma.