The hormone prolactin is known for and named after its role in breastfeeding. But that is far from its only role. There are more than 300 identified functions of prolactin, which is present in both men and women, though women have higher levels, and extremely high levels late in pregnancy and during breastfeeding. Now, scientists at the University of Arizona have identified another function of prolactin signaling.
For depression, and other mental health disorders, the era of precision medicine has yet to arrive.
Symptoms are “very poorly reflective of the underlying biology,” Amit Etkin told BioWorld. Depression can manifest through multiple different symptoms that differ both between and within cultures.
BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: CD47 knockout improves antitumor vaccine; Multiple edits make for durable T cells; Endothelial cells have functional deficits in progeria; Myelin is deregulated in autism spectrum disorder; More enhancers suggest more pathogenicity: study; Just the vesicles, please; Distinguishing real from backseat drivers; Blocking bad bone; Plexin D1 is receptor and mechanosensor in 1; Monocytes have it both ways in DMD.
The drug screens prompted by the SARS and MERS outbreaks have been useful for quickly identifying drug candidates. But in terms of their epidemiology, “SARS and MERS were different from this coronavirus,” Allison McGeer explained at a Feb. 3 webinar by Evercore ISI.
LONDON – The genomes of 38 different tumor types and the 47 million mutations that fostered their growth are revealed in unprecedented detail in 23 studies published in Nature and other journals on Feb. 6, 2020.
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.
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