Researchers have identified a new class of antibiotics that works by blocking the transportation of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to the outer membrane of the gram-negative bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii. The most advanced member of the class, zosurabalpin (RG-6006, Roche AG), was effective against multiple A. baumannii strains, including carbapenem-resistant and multidrug-resistant strains.

In November, investigators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported generating a chimeric monkey by injecting an embryonic stem cell into the morula, which is an extremely early embryo consisting of 16 to 32 cells.

Researchers have used explainable artificial intelligence (explainable AI) to find structurally new antibiotics with minimal toxicity. They reported their findings online in Nature on Dec. 20, 2023. In animal testing, compounds identified via the method showed that they had activity against drug-resistant gram-positive bacteria including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most serious bacterial public health threats.

In their year-end list of top scientific achievements and the people who made them, both Science and Nature have included the fight against “the obesity epidemic.” Science named GLP-1 drugs as its Breakthrough of the Year, while Nature included Svetlana Mojsov in its 2023 list of the year’s most important investigators. Mojsov is research associate professor at The Rockefeller University and was an early contributor to understanding the metabolic role of GLP.

Katy Rezvani received this year’s E. Donnall Thomas Prize for her work on natural killer (NK) cells at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). It was not love at first sight, though.

The Nobel Prize-winning modification that prevents the innate immune system from recognizing injected mRNA as foreign and blocking transcription of the protein it encodes has been found on some occasions to cause ribosomal frameshifting.

The gene for Huntington’s disease “was cloned in 1993, and everyone thought there was going to be a treatment right around the corner,” Sarah Tabrizi told the audience at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Then, “it took 25 years for the first trial targeting the Huntington gene.”

Investigators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have generated a chimeric monkey by injecting an embryonic stem cell into the morula, which is an extremely early embryo consisting of 16 to 32 cells. The animal survived for only 10 days, and it is not the first live birth of a chimeric primate. But it is the first such chimera with contributions from an embryonic stem cell, and that stem cell contributed a far higher proportion of cells in the newborn than have been achieved in previous attempts at creating chimeras.

The largest genetic analysis of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) carried out to date has identified almost 100 new risk variants linked to the disorder. The study also highlighted a possible therapeutic target for this pathology that, at the moment, has no treatment. AAA affects 4% of people over 65 years of age in the U.S. and causes 41,000 deaths per year. The incidence is three to four times higher in men than in women.

At the 30th Annual Congress of the European Society for Gene and Cell Therapy in Brussels this week, researchers presented both preclinical and clinical strategies for applying gene therapy to a functional HIV cure. At a Wednesday session on Infectious Diseases & Vaccines, Alessio Nahmad, of Tabby Therapeutics Ltd., described using B cells edited to express broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) 3BNC117 to deliver high titers of antibodies in mice.