Scientists at the University of Connecticut have made progress in understanding the role of the targetable TRPM2 channel in the context of atherosclerosis, as they report in the March 28, 2022, issue of Nature Cardiovascular Research.

In the Feb. 9, 2022, issue of Science Translational Medicine, investigators reported the anatomical location in which the Ebola virus was hiding and persisting in nonhuman primates had otherwise appeared to have been cured by monoclonal therapy prior to the relapse.

Intracranial aneurysms, outwards bulges ballooning out of an artery, are surprisingly common in middle age, with an estimated prevalence of 2% in the general population. While only a small fraction of these common aneurysms actually go on to rupture, one-fourth of these ruptured aneurysms will lead to sudden death before hospitalization.

Researchers working at Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic reported in the November 8, 2021, issue of Nature Cancer that an inhibitor of the beta-amyloid producing enzyme, BACE1, could reprogram tumor-promoting M2 macrophages to exert M1 tumor-suppressing activities in animal models of glioblastoma multiforme.

Despite the identification of the APOE gene as the strongest genetic link to late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) since 1993 and the subsequent advances in the understanding of AD pathogenesis, the development of effective consensus-directed treatment therapies has yet to be realized.

Investigators working at Gladstone Institutes reported new insights into sleep disturbances and seizures that can be a late consequence of even mild traumatic brain injuries (TBI), and how we may one day best treat these conditions by targeting the complement pathway.

In Cell Metabolism, researchers working at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported that when fat cells (adipocytes) are chronically stressed, as is characteristic of obesity, they can release small vesicle exosomes that are respiration-competent and essentially portions of mitochondria.

Sometimes highly impactful serendipitous discoveries are made when performing genetic loss-of-function studies that were initially focused on putative tumor suppressors or other hypotheses.

In the July 12, 2021, issue of Nature Aging, researchers working at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging describe analysis from 1,001 immunomes of generally healthy patients correlating soluble immune biomarkers against measures of multimorbidity, immunosenescence, frailty and cardiovascular disease over 11 years of longitudinal study.

Researchers report in the June 21, 2021, online issue of Neuron that overexpression of the LDL receptor can reduce ApoE to prevent tauopathy-associated neurodegeneration in mouse models.