WASHINGTON – "There is nothing more beautiful than 20/20 hindsight," Huda Zoghbi told the audience at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

WASHINGTON – "In the 21st century, there is not a single cure for a single neurodegenerative disease. Not one. . . . There are no therapeutics. There is no strategy. There is bupkes in the 21st century."

Fibroblasts are the major cell type that is responsible for wound healing, as they migrate to the sites of injuries and secrete extracellular matrix molecules that physically allow repair of damaged tissue.

Transgenic skin stem cells combined with improved tissue engineering methods have enabled an almost total autologous skin transplant for a 7-year-old child with junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB), a rare genetic disease that causes the top layer of skin, the epidermis, to separate from the underlying dermis.

Treating aging rats with an experimental compound that prevented neuronal cell death protected the animals from both depressive symptoms that are often the first symptom of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and the memory decline that follows. The compound did not, however, affect the amyloid beta (a-beta) plaques, tau phosphorylation and inflammation that are widely considered to be the toxic agents behind neuronal demise in AD.

Blocking poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) will selectively kill tumor cells with some types of DNA repair deficiencies, a vulnerability known as synthetic lethality.

A lot of effort has been expended on understanding what determines the efficacy of checkpoint blockade. Much of that effort has been focused on the tumor and the immune system – reasonably enough, since those are the direct combatants in the tumor-immune face-off.

In oncology, there is a saying that "the tissue is the issue," meaning that to determine the best way to deal with a tumor, you need to biopsy it – and that such biopsies can be difficult to obtain.