As far as adult regeneration goes, the lung and liver are far better than most human tissues. Even those organs, however, can become unable to repair themselves in the face of persistent injuries, such as those caused by smoking or excessive drinking. Experimentally, regenerative capacity can be restored by stem cell transplants.

Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel, CTL-019, Novartis AG) and other chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have been making their way through clinical trials as cell therapies. So the FDA’s Aug. 30 announcement that its approval of Kymriah was “a historic action today making the first gene therapy available in the United States” initially led to some head-scratching.

With the release of the abstracts for next week’s annual meeting of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) late Wednesday, meeting preparation moved into high gear.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a very large receptor family targeted by a very large number of endogenous ligands, as well as a respectable fraction of FDA-approved drugs.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are stem cells that have been generated from adult cells through the application of Yamanaka factors, a cocktail of transcription factors named after iPSC pioneer Shinya Yamanaka. Such rejuvenated cells could potentially be a great source of autologous cells for transplantation.

Researchers from Emory University have identified microbiome-produced metabolites that extended healthspan in aged flies, worms, and mice, without affecting lifespan. Much of anti-aging research has been focused on lifespan extension, but in many cases, extending lifespan in animals has not extended their healthspan, meaning that the net result of lifespan extension is that they have spent more time frail or sick.

By studying both postmortem brains of depressed humans and animal models of stress-induced depression, researchers have discovered that the gene expression patterns associated with depression are very different in males and females.

Researchers from the Dutch VU University Medical Center have adapted the mathematical algorithms that are used to describe the behaviors of schooling fish and swarming birds to identify RNA biomarkers in blood samples that were capable of diagnosing early and late stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and distinguishing such patients from patients with inflammatory conditions.