PARIS – A Russian research consortium has discovered that coating magnetic nanoparticles with a non-magnetic silica shell significantly decreased the viability of cancer cells in a low frequency alternating magnetic field. This discovery may augur new therapeutic prospects for nanotechnology combined with medical imaging.

Despite the identification of the APOE gene as the strongest genetic link to late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) since 1993 and the subsequent advances in the understanding of AD pathogenesis, the development of effective consensus-directed treatment therapies has yet to be realized.

The French Cosegregation Variant study, a collaboration by cancer genetics clinics and laboratories led by geneticists at the Curie Institute in Paris, has demonstrated that cosegregation analysis represents a powerful tool for classifying variants in BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast-ovarian cancer predisposition genes.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to Benjamin List, director of the Max Planck Institut for Carbon Research, and David MacMillan, professor of chemistry at Princeton University, "for their development of asymmetric organocatalysis."

"My fondest hope is that maybe depression and other mental health disorders may be diagnosed by underlying cause, rather than categorized dualistically," Edward Bullmore, director of the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, and head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, told his audience at the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP). "I think it's much more aligned with the way that the rest of medicine has been working for some time."

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded Oct. 4 to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”

Low-grade gliomas with mutated isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) produced and secreted higher levels of the cytokine granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) than other glioma types, which improved their antitumor immune response in animal models.

By cataloging protein-protein interactions in cell lines, and combining their results with in vivo studies as well as publicly available data, scientists have defined new interactions that could be used diagnostically, and/or harnessed, for well-studied cancer drivers and more obscure proteins alike.

Horseshoe or Rhinopolus bats in Laos carry coronavirus species with a near-identical receptor binding domain to SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper posted on the preprint server Research Square by investigators from the Pasteur Institutes of Paris and Laos.

An international collaborative study has identified several novel derivatives of anticancer proteasome inhibitors (PIs) that had potential as antimalarials, the authors reported in the September 28, 2021, online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.