At this very early point in the emerging 2019-nCoV outbreak, knowledge about the virus is insufficient to predict what shape that outbreak will ultimately take. But knowledge about the virus is accumulating at remarkable speed, and experience with other viruses is helping to shape the response to the newest coronavirus threat. 2019-nCoV, sometimes called Wuhan coronavirus after its source, is the third coronavirus after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV with the potential to cause serious illness and death that has emerged since the beginning of the 21st century.
BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Adapting NGS for coronavirus surveillance; Long QT genes mostly short on evidence; Reservoir dogs don’t hunt; Another reason to get a flu shot; Cerebrospinal fluid is early culprit in stroke edema; Different drivers can turn the wheel in glioblastoma’s vicious cycle; From African genomes, big insights with small sample size; Commercial antibodies underwhelm for studies of PP2A; Tau keeps gliomas in check.
DUBLIN – The witty Twitter account @justsaysinmice, run by Northeastern University research scientist Jim Heathers, offers a very useful corrective to the misleading and unwarranted hype that often accompanies preclinical studies in mice. What looks good in murine models is all too often lost in translation, for a whole host of reasons, and never has any useful effect in patients. That’s not a concern for a group led by Thomas Thum, of the Institute of Molecular and Translational Therapeutic Strategies at Hannover Medical School in Germany, who just published in Nature Communications the outcome of what is probably the largest ever pig study in heart failure.
When developmental neurobiologist Arnold Kriegstein talks about his work, it sounds for all the world like he is talking about the brains of teenagers. They are stressed. Their identity is mixed up. But putting them in a good environment is helpful to their development. Kriegstein, though, was describing brain organoids.
Australian researchers led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney have compiled the first reference genome database of healthy older Australians, which potentially can predict disease-linked gene variants more accurately than has been previously possible.
LONDON – Researchers have discovered a T-cell receptor (TCR) that is both capable of targeting a range of solid tumors and independent of human leukocyte (HLA) type, opening up the prospect of developing a universal anticancer T-cell therapy.
An international collaborative study led by geneticists at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research Berghofer Medical Research Institute (QIMR) in Brisbane, Australia, has used a multivariate approach to develop a polygenic risk score (PRS) for glaucoma.
Two independent groups of researchers have achieved HIV latency reversal not just in T cells in the bloodstream, but also in tissues, in animal models of HIV infection. Latently infected cells, which have nonreplicating HIV integrated into their genomes, are a major barrier to curing HIV, and attempts to reactivate latently infected cells, which would sensitize the virus in them to antiretroviral treatment, are one major area of HIV cure research.
Remember how Ras is a frequently mutated oncogene in solid tumors? Well, it turns out Ras plays a role in those memories, too. In the Jan. 13, 2020, online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Juniper, Fla., reported on the discovery that Ras signals through Raf and then Rho kinase to control whether memory is short or long-term.
Scientists at the Whitehead Institute have discovered that the ability of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii to cause chronic infections depends on changes orchestrated by a single transcription factor, Bradyzoite-formation deficient 1 (BFD1).
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