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.

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.