With Friday’s last-minute decision to move to an all-virtual format, the opening session of the 2020 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was certainly an unusual one. “We are in uncharted waters,” conference co-chair Sharon Hillier, Richard Sweet Professor of Reproductive Infectious Disease at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told the audience via livestream.
In the Marvel Comic Universe, Venom is a superhero who started life as a supervillain and Spiderman foe. In the biopharma universe, scorpion venom is undergoing the same fate transformation, as separate papers this week reported new ways to use scorpion venom in two major therapeutic targeting challenges.
BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Serine improves memory in Alzheimer’s mouse model; From junk to noncoding to coding; Keeping stem cells quiescent enables greater ultimate potency; Female, male fat tissue flight inflammation differently; BioPROTACs cut out middleman, and small molecule; ‘Gut bug’ has intratumoral effects; Decoy exosomes fight bacterial toxin; Unexpected mechanism, combination possibilities for CDK 4/6 inhibitors; In SIV infection, gut integrity is retained, not repaired.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in diagnostics, including: Question of COVID-19 contagion window; A paper-based, portable coronavirus test; Finding the next pandemic threat early on; Anatomy study reveals schizophrenia subtypes.
Lowering levels of tau protein improved multiple symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in two different mouse models of the disease, both of which are driven by hyperactivity of the mTOR PI3 kinase pathway.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in oncology, including: Study identifies two different cancer stem cells in cervical cancer; How cancer cells hibernate…; …And who makes their bed; Blocking trash trashes MSI-hi tumors.
Sadly, a major part of the answer to why drugs are so expensive appears to be “because they can be.” But the high cost of drugs has also spurred a number of attempts to find medicines that are innovative but remain affordable. Drug repurposing, or using a drug that has been developed for one ailment to treat a different one, is one such strategy.
Lowering levels of tau protein improved multiple symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in two different mouse models of the disease, both of which are driven by hyperactivity of the mTOR PI3 kinase pathway.
BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Finding the next pandemic threat early on; Microglial fresh start helps heal brain trauma; Finding the silent majority; Anatomy study reveals schizophrenia subtypes; Increasing immune activity improves autoimmunity; How cancer cells hibernate…; …And who makes their bed; Blocking trash trashes MSI-hi tumors; New splicing factor implicated in muscular dystrophy.
Beyond every binary is a more complex reality. And so it is with driver and passenger mutations. The separation of tumor mutations into drivers and passengers underpins much progress in the development of targeted therapies.
