MEXICO CITY – The 2019 International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Science kicked off over the weekend with the usual pre-conference workshops, including a workshop by the IAS Towards an HIV Cure initiative.

Anorexia nervosa, Cynthia Bulik told BioWorld, has a long-term recovery rate of 25% and “the highest fatality rate of any psychiatric illness.” Those dismal statistics hint at the challenging nature of anorexia nervosa, but also at the shortcomings of current treatment options.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have developed a machine learning program that could score the risk of pancreatic cysts and recommend one of three treatment strategies – surgery, watchful waiting or discharge without follow-up – more accurately than current methods. The program could potentially reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries performed on pancreatic cysts with little to no potential of turning cancerous.

A team at Dartmouth University has shown that in fruit flies, stressful experiences could lead to epigenetic changes that led to a preference for ethanol-rich foods for several generation of offspring. 

To hear Peter Sorger tell it, the reproducibility crisis is a good news/bad news situation.His team's "strangely simple and encouraging message" about the reproducibility crisis, Sorger told BioWorld, is that "we know exactly how to solve it... In the totally ordinary doing of science, you can figure out how to make an assay reproducible." Sources of variability "can be subjected to empirical analysis, and you can develop reproducible protocols, with some effort." The bad news is that what bedevils reproducibility is harder to fix than quality control. "The current incentive structure of the scientific enterprise," Sorger said, "is not designed to encourage reproducible science."

By priming CAR T cells through antigen delivery to the lymph node, researchers have boosted the responses of CAR T cells to solid tumor antigens.

Researchers have shown that by using a combination of genome editing and long-acting slow-effective release antiviral therapy (LASER ART), they were able to eradicate HIV reservoirs and cure nearly 40% of HIV-infected mice.