The 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been awarded to Richard Hynes, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erkki Ruoslahti, of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and Timothy Springer, of Harvard Medical School.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 was awarded to Svante Pääbo today "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution." Pääbo, who is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues overcame extreme technical challenges to sequence the DNA of ancient hominids – because after tens of thousands of years, there is no such thing as aging well for DNA.
Researchers are closer to better diagnosing and treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD) after discovering new genetic signatures of the disease by reprogramming stem cells to generate high-resolution disease models.
The controversy about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the accusations that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or even that it was deliberately engineered there, could – possibly – be brought to a close by two papers published July 26, 2022.
Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the attempts to rapidly develop a vaccine that was effective against current strains, researchers have been looking for a vaccine that could protect more broadly against multiple coronaviruses.
There are 40 years of history behind the development of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitors, Rebecca Dent told her audience at ESMO Breast Cancer 2022. And there have been success stories. There are five FDA-approved PI3K inhibitors in several cancer types, and in April, the FDA approved Vijoice (alpelisib; Novartis AG) for PIK3CA-related overgrowth spectrum, a rare disorder resulting from germline mutations of PIK3CA.
There is a project management joke that the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, whereas the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.
Researchers at Inserm have developed a method to direct pre-existing antibodies toward new targets. Their bimodular fusion proteins could be a broadly useful method for expanding access to antibody therapy. In a study that appeared in the Feb. 11, 2022, issue of Science Advances, the teams showed that antibodies to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which are present in 95% of the global population, could be redirected to a target cell of their choosing by fusing an EBV antigen to a cellular targeting ligand.
It is acknowledged that the huge bias toward individuals of European ancestry means studies of the contribution of genetics to disease may not translate well to other ethnicities. That point is underlined in the first large-scale investigation of the population structure and demographic history of British Pakistanis, which shows an increased number and length of regions of homozygosity inherited from a common ancestor, and greatly elevated identity by descent, compared to the population at large.
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