If you believe the theme of the World Dementia Council (WDC) meeting in London this week, dementia is “in a new era,” where it will be possible to prevent, diagnose and treat neurodegenerative disease. That is not the case for most people living with dementia today, but the approval of the first disease-modifying drugs and the imminent arrival of new blood-based biomarkers is “a big moment,” Lenny Shallcross, executive director of WDC told the meeting on Mar. 20.

If you believe the theme of the World Dementia Council (WDC) meeting in London this week, dementia is “in a new era,” where it will be possible to prevent, diagnose and treat neurodegenerative disease. That is not the case for most people living with dementia today, but the approval of the first disease-modifying drugs and the imminent arrival of new blood-based biomarkers is “a big moment,” Lenny Shallcross, executive director of WDC told the meeting on Mar. 20.

It is approved as a food additive. But it now appears that sucralose can dampen T-cell-mediated immune responses, suggesting it could be a means of treating T-cell-dependent autoimmune disorders. While stressing (repeatedly) that they were studying intakes well above normal, at high but achievable doses sucralose has an unexpected effect on T-cell responses and functions in autoimmune, infection and tumor models, researchers at The Francis Crick Institute, London, reported in Nature March 15, 2023.

Newco Teitur Trophics ApS has raised €28 million (US$30.1 million) in a series A with which it will lay out a new route to targeting sortilin in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The company is targeting the sortilin-related Vps10p domain containing receptor, which plays a role in regulating a number of pathways involved in the control of neuronal viability and function.

Somatic human genome editing has made huge strides in the past five years, but the likely extremely high prices will be unsustainable. A global commitment to affordable, equitable access is urgently needed because the costs and infrastructure needs of this form of treatment are not manageable for either patients or health care systems.

The researcher who pioneered prenatal surgery to correct neural tube defects has turned her attention to using CRISPR-edited gene therapies to correct severe monogenic diseases in utero. The availability of prenatal genetic diagnosis and advances in treating fetuses, and also in gene therapy/gene editing, make it possible to repair almost any defect in the genetic code. At the same time, there is a clear rationale for intervening before birth, Tippi MacKenzie, professor of surgery at UCSF’s School of Medicine, told attendees of the third International Human Genome Editing Conference in London on March 7.

The U.S. Recover program, set up in July 2022 to identify the causes of long COVID, find biomarkers of disease and discover new therapeutic targets, is now preparing to move to its next phase and begin testing potential treatments in a multi-arm, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. But with 200 different symptoms, and limited understanding of relevant system-level pathological targets, there are significant hurdles to be overcome.

Newco Relation Therapeutics Ltd. is showing its colors after raising $25 million in a seed round to work on integrating single cell transcriptomics, functional genomics and machine learning – and cut through previously undecipherable combinatorial space – to find and validate drug targets in the non-coding genome.