Scientists at Stanford University have shown that activation of the opioid transmission system was necessary for ketamine's antidepressant effects. Ketamine, originally developed for its anesthetic properties, is also an effective antidepressant in about half of all individuals with treatment-resistant depression.
In findings that underscore the complex roles of inflammation in the brain, researchers have reported that in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD), proinflammatory cytokines protected the animals from developing seizures that were severe enough to kill the animals.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a gene therapy method that was successful in treating an autosomal dominant form of blindness in preclinical experiments.
Scientists at Synlogic Inc. have engineered bacteria to produce phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH), the gene that is missing or dysfunctional in individuals with phenylketonuria (PKU). Currently in a phase I trial in healthy volunteers and adult phenylketonurics, the bacteria sit at an intersection between synthetic biology and gene correction.
Ovarian cancers, as well as several other difficult-to-treat cancer types, are characterized by complex copy number alterations – that is, they have copy number alterations, but those alterations differ from tumor to tumor. Researchers from the British Cambridge University and Imperial College London have developed a method to classify such tumors by the underlying genomic housekeeping problem that led to their formation.
Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) has long been a thorn in the side of dengue vaccine developers. In the Aug. 14, 2018, issue of Cell Reports, a team from the University of Texas Medical Branch showed that ADE occurred with human antibodies to the Ebola virus as well, but it could be prevented by engineering antibodies to prevent their interaction with immune cells.
It's an unexpected form of optimization for sure. But researchers at the University of Virginia have combined aspects of two antibodies that have failed in clinical trials to make a bispecific antibody that was able to shrink ovarian tumors in vivo.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have reported both preclinical data and a case study of a patient treated under a compassionate use protocol indicating that the tropomyosin receptor kinase (TRK) fusion inhibitor larotrectinib (LOXO-101, Loxo Oncology Inc.) is effective in hematological malignancies as well as in solid tumors, where it is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
