Nephrotic syndrome is a kidney disorder characterized by abnormal functioning of the glomerular filtration barrier, and is frequently caused by focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). At the World Congress of Nephrology meeting this week, researchers presented a case report of a 32-year-old female patient with nephrotic syndrome caused by FSGS diagnosed when she was 27.
The autophagy process, a critical regulator of T-cell function, has been shown to control acute HIV-1 infection and play a crucial role also in HIV-1 disease pathogenesis.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive type of breast cancer with poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options, and it accounts for 15%-20% of female invasive breast cancers.
Bladder cancer is among the top 10 malignant tumors, still with a high mortality rate. There is a need for reliable biomarkers for early diagnosis of the disease. Proximity extension analysis (PEA) is a method that uses a quantitative PCR readout to analyze protein levels in plasma in longitudinal studies and genomic association studies.
At a recent meeting on “Research priorities for preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias” (ADRD), convened by the National Academies, one consensus priority on ADRD research was that there needs to be more of it at every stage. Several speakers presented stark numbers on the relative volume of research in cancer and neurodegeneration. Research output, measured in peer-reviewed papers, for dementia is estimated to be around 10,000 papers annually, compared to 150,000 for cancer, while AD clinical trials are also few and far between compared to cancer trials. This final installment of BioWorld’s series on Alzheimer’s explores some of the reasons for this discrepancy along with the latest advances and ongoing efforts to accelerate research and drug development in the field.
Volastra Therapeutics Inc. has entered into partnerships with Microsoft Corp., Function Oncology Inc. and Tailor Bio Ltd. with the goal of expanding the potential use of its KIF18A inhibitors.
Plasma pharmacodynamic biomarkers may be a reliable tool for biosimilarity assessment without having to rely on clinical trials, which are costly and time consuming.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease for which there is a 10% rate of familial cases, with the rest being sporadic cases. Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the etiology of ALS, and more than 120 genes have been reported to be tied to the disease, but few with strong association. Thus, identifying additional genes contributing to ALS will help shed light on the disease and its related therapies.
To Steve Hyman, the manual that clinicians currently use to diagnose mental disorders is an active obstacle to getting a scientific understanding of those disorders. Hyman, who is director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, MIT and Harvard, and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), listed multiple weaknesses of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose diagnoses, he said, are “arbitrary, rigid, life-stage and context-insensitive,” as well as blind to the fact that mental disorders exist along a continuum.
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