The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 was awarded to Svante Pääbo today "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution." Pääbo, who is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues overcame extreme technical challenges to sequence the DNA of ancient hominids – because after tens of thousands of years, there is no such thing as aging well for DNA.

The 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been awarded to Richard Hynes, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erkki Ruoslahti, of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and Timothy Springer, of Harvard Medical School “for discoveries concerning the integrins, key mediators of cell-matrix and cell-cell adhesion in physiology and disease.”

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new genome editing technique than can activate any gene, including those that have been silenced, allowing new drug targets and causes of drug resistance to be explored.

Investigators at Washington State University (WSU) have identified a set of eight proteins that were expressed in the serum of Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear, specifically during their hibernation period. In addition to reporting new basic insights into hibernation, the study, which was published in the Sept. 21, 2022, issue of iScience, could also give clues to insulin resistance and its relationship to body fat.

Sex differences at the cellular level could explain why men respond less well to glioblastoma (GBM) treatments, according to a study led by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSTL). The researchers found that male and female GBM tumor cells had different metabolic needs. GBM cells from male surgical samples absorbed more glutamine and had different nutritional preferences for amino acids.

How well connectomic models of the brain could be used to the predict performance of a specific person on cognitive tests was influenced by sociodemographic characteristics of that person, such as age and education. The findings, which were published in the Aug. 25, 2022, issue of Nature, suggest that models of cognition “are not predicting unitary cognitive constructs, such as episodic memory. Rather, they are predicting composites: measures of these constructs intertwined with sociodemographic and clinical covariates,” first author Abigail Greene told BioWorld.

Researchers from ESPCI Paris (Paris University for Industrial Physics and Chemistry), are working on a novel functional neuroimaging technique for measuring whole-brain activity dynamically at the microscopic level.

Treatment with injections of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), indicated to prevent sexual maturation deficits in Down syndrome, also reduced cognitive function impairment associated with Down syndrome, also called trisomy 21. With age, about three-quarters of people with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease. They also lose their sense of smell. Both circumstances could improve with pulse doses of GnRH, according to a study led by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL) published in the Sept. 1, 2022, issue of Science.

Treatment with injections of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, indicated to prevent sexual maturation deficits in Down syndrome, also reduced cognitive function impairment associated Down syndrome, also called trisomy 21.