Advances in antiretroviral therapy (ART) now allow people living with HIV to lead normal lives with undetectable and nontransmissible levels of the virus in their blood. Yet that reality is limited to those with access to treatment. More than 40 million people worldwide live with HIV, with over a million new infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, underscoring that major challenges remain.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has identified a new recombinant strain of mpox (formerly monkeypox) that contains elements of clade Ib and clade IIb of the virus, in a traveler who recently returned from Asia. In a paper describing the new strain, the researchers at UKHSA say it is not possible to determine from a single genome how long the recombinant virus has been in circulation, or whether it will have a fitness benefit over currently circulating lineages.

At the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego this week, Catherine Woolley’s plenary lecture was an unusual combination of debunking and affirming the importance of sex differences in the brain.

By transplanting a pig kidney into a brain-dead person, researchers have been able to conduct the first long-term study of the physiological processes occurring in both the transplant recipient and the pig organ for 61 days. The findings were published in the Nov. 14, 2025, issue of Nature in two papers – one focusing on physiological and immunological measurements, the other on multiomics.

Researchers from the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and their collaborators have identified adenosine as the driving force behind the rapid, fast-acting antidepressant effects of ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). “Our journey into this area of research began over a decade ago, around 2013, when the clinical world was buzzing with excitement about ketamine's remarkably rapid antidepressant effects,” Minmin Luo, co-senior author of the study, told BioWorld.

South Korean researchers led by Lee In-suk of Yonsei University have reported the most complete oral microbiome catalog to date, with more than 72,000 genomes. Detailed in Cell Host & Microbe on Nov. 12, 2025, the database is expected to serve as a universal platform for academia and enable “precision microbiome medicine” for the industry, Lee told BioWorld.

The U.K. government has published a road map for phasing out animal testing in life sciences research and announced £75 million (US$98.6 million) for work to develop nonanimal models, leaving scientists concerned because they say, in many cases, there can never be meaningful alternatives to using live animals.

Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) live year-round in the icy or near-icy waters of the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Although they migrate with the seasonal cycles of ice formation and melting, they never reach the warmer waters visited by other large marine mammals. Their adaptation to low temperatures may have also enabled them to live longer and avoid cancer, a disease closely linked to aging.

While recent advances in gene therapy have offered unprecedented options for patients with hemophilia, new data presented at the 32nd Annual Congress of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT), held in Seville Oct. 7-10, revealed persistent concerns regarding the durability of these treatments and their potential liver toxicity.

As the many challenges facing cell therapies are being addressed, the CAR T field continues to evolve beyond its original design of T cells engineered to target hematological malignancies. During the 32nd Annual Congress of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT), held in Seville Oct. 7-10, several studies showed how this technology is being redefined as programmable and adaptable immune cells with expanded functional versatility.