WASHINGTON – In case any question remained about who shoulders the blame for the serious lack of viable innovation in the infectious disease specialty, a panel at the Infectious Disease Society of America's IDWeek 2019 came with a surprisingly accusatory subtitle: "How ID Killed Antibiotic Development." Observing what Vivo Capital Managing Partner Chen Yu called "an existential crisis for the specialty," the session served as a call for action for infectious disease (ID) doctors to take control of prescribing, put patient care ahead of cost management, and advocate for both faster changes to clinical guidelines and legislative improvements to better position the industry.

At the 2019 Congress of the European Society of Medical Oncology, PARP inhibitors continued their victory march. With the success of the PAOLA-1 trial, reported in Friday's plenary session, as well as the PRIMA and VELIA/GOG-3005 trials, "we've got new front-line data that really introduces a paradigm shift into the way we're going to treat ovarian cancer in the coming years," Jonathan Ledermann, professor of medical oncology at University College London, told the audience at a session on new options on ovarian cancer.

BARCELONA, Spain – Sunday's Presidential Symposium at the 2019 Congress of the European Society of Medical Oncology was devoted to breast cancer studies, and two of those studies – MONARCH-2 and MONALEESA-3 – reported an overall survival (OS) benefit of combining a CDK4/6 inhibitor with endocrine therapy Faslodex (fulvestrant) in metastatic hormone receptor-positive (HR+) breast cancer in several different settings.

BARCELONA, Spain – At the 2019 Conference of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO), results from the ClarIDHy and FIGHT-202 trials, both testing drugs for the treatment of cholangiocarcinoma, illustrated how molecular medicine can bring new treatments to rare tumors.

BARCELONA, Spain – This year's theme at the European Society for Medical Oncology's (ESMO) 2019 annual meeting is "translating science into better patient care."

The leucine-repeat rich kinase 2 (Lrrk2) gets most of its attention in the context of Parkinson's disease (PD). Variants in Lrrk2 are a major cause of familial PD (though familial PD makes up only a small fraction of overall PD cases).

CAR T cells engineered to target fibroblast activating protein (FAP) could reverse cardiac fibrosis and restore cardiac function in mice, researchers have reported in the Sept. 12, 2019, issue of Nature.

The 2019 Lasker Award winners were announced Tuesday, adding five researchers and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, to its roster of Laureates.

By preventing ice formation while cooling human livers below freezing, researchers have managed to extend the viable lifespan of donated livers threefold.

Telomerase's reputation is that it has an important role in maintaining the ability of stem cells to divide through maintaining telomeres, the structures at the tips of chromosomes that shorten with each replication cycle.