Activating Sirtuin1 may be a host-directed strategy to fight tuberculosis infection, researchers from the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research have reported.
Amgen Inc. presented detailed data for the FOURIER cardiovascular outcomes trial of its Repatha (evolocumab) at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual meeting, which showed that those benefits were clinically significant, not just statistically significant. But the magnitude of the effects reported also showed that for it to be cost-effective, Repatha's price will need to be significantly lower than its current list price of roughly $14,500 per year.
Researchers have developed a small molecule that could fully reverse resistance to the tuberculosis drug ethionamide, a backbone of tuberculosis treatment that is losing its effectiveness in some multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains.
In preclinical experiments, treatment with the experimental antibody Hu5F9-G4 (Forty Seven Inc.), which is designed to block inhibitory interactions between tumor cells and macrophages, shrank several different types of pediatric brain tumors. The study findings, reported in the March 15, 2017, issue of Science Translational Medicine, mark the first time that the innate immune system has been targeted in pediatric brain tumors.
Comprehensive analysis of mutational patterns has demonstrated that roughly 20 percent of breast tumors showed a mutational signature that was characteristic of BRCA mutations. Even without BRCA mutations, the mutational pattern suggests such tumors might have the same sensitivity to poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors as tumors with detectable BRCA mutations.
Loss of the survival of motor neuron 1 (SMN1) gene causes spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which leads to paralysis and ultimately death, and is currently the most frequent monogenic cause of infant mortality.
Engineered blood cells were able to alleviate and prevent symptoms of type I diabetes (T1D) and multiple sclerosis (MS), two of the more common autoimmune diseases, by inducing immune tolerance to antigens.
Pentamidine, an antiparasitic drug that is on the World Health Organization's (WHO) list of essential medicines and is used to treat conditions including leishmaniasis and pneumocystis pneumonia, sensitized gram-negative bacteria to antibiotics that are usually effective only for treating gram-positive bugs, including bacterial strains that were resistant to colistin.
Even in fresh, high-quality DNA samples, the act of sequencing itself induced DNA damage at a frequency comparable to that of rare mutations occurring, potentially confounding the identification of rare variants.
