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.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke have demonstrated that systemic infections after either traumatic brain injury or cerebrovascular injury impair the repair of blood vessels by competing for the services of immune cells, in particular, proangiogenic myeloid cells.

Trimers of nanobodies, a simpler form of antibody made by some animal species, were effective at preventing and treating COVID-19 in preclinical studies, researchers reported in the Sept. 22, 2021, issue of Nature Communications. The findings, along with others, could form the basis of an inhaled biologics treatment for COVID-19 and, ultimately, other respiratory diseases.

A multicenter study led by scientists at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Melbourne, Australia, has described a new mesenteric lymph vessel-based pathogenic mechanism, which was shown to contribute to visceral fat accumulation and insulin resistance in both mice and humans.

Trimers of nanobodies, a simpler form of antibody made by some animal species, were effective at preventing and treating COVID-19 in preclinical studies, researchers reported in the Sept. 22, 2021, issue of Nature Communications.

Although targeted therapies are prescribed on the basis of a patient's molecular makeup, they do not work every time. And in those instances where they do work, they basically stop working every time. In response, researchers have developed a number of systems whose goal it is to predict which drugs will be effective for an individual patients.