The Nobel Committee announced today that it has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three scientists for their discovery of regulatory T cells, which are a critical part of the way the body prevents autoimmune attacks.

Pharma companies are collaborating to boost the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery by allowing access to proprietary structural data to train a large language model. Each of the partners is contributing data from several thousand experimentally determined protein:ligand interactions, creating one of the most diverse datasets and the richest chemistry assembled to date for model training.

Globally, over half of people living with HIV are women. But in clinical cure trials, they make up only about 20% of participants. And that gender imbalance is causing researchers to miss out on ways to improve cure strategies. Because women’s immune systems appear to be better at controlling HIV infection in a way that silences the reservoir – the provirus integrated into host cells in infected persons.

A new generative AI model trained on UK Biobank data can simultaneously forecast the risks and timing of developing over 1,000 different diseases a decade into the future. The developers applied similar algorithmic concepts to those used to develop large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini to build the model, using medical records from 402,799 participants in UK Biobank.

If a cancer patient has bone metastases, they will frequently have anemia as well. Given that the bone marrow is the site of blood cell formation, this observation is perhaps not unexpected. But its molecular underpinnings had been unclear to date. Now, researchers at Princeton University and the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey have identified a specialized group of iron-transporting macrophages in the metastasis-anemia link.

New research has filled in missing links between gene variants that have been implicated in disease through genome-wide association studies and how the variants drive disease pathology. The research involved using induced pluripotent stem cells derived from healthy donors and transforming them into macrophages. These were then exposed to 24 different stimuli mimicking infection and inflammation, and the gene expression profiles assessed six and 24 hours later, to see which genes were turned on or off in response.

Despite having lower smoking habits than other groups in the U.S., Black Americans are more likely to develop lung cancer, and their survival rates are significantly worse. What explains this disparity? Scientists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have analyzed the genetics of their African ancestry in search of risk genes related to the disease and tobacco use. The results reveal new risk factors and confirm the presence of genetic variants that may contribute to the greater impact of lung cancer in this population.

The largest genome-wide association study to date of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome has identified eight genetic loci that are significantly associated with the chronic debilitating condition. Onset of ME/CFS often is traced back to an infection and four of the loci involve genes that are expressed in response to viral or bacterial infections.