Scientists from the Major Depressive Disorder Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and the Karolinska Institutet have mapped the effects of schizophrenia risk variants to a few specific cell types. Knowledge of the risk variants themselves has not yet led to obvious new targets for the disorder, in part because of the brain's large number of cell types.

Weak binding to a shallow pocket is not what most drug developers would consider characteristics of a viable drug lead, let alone a desirable one.

Targeted complement inhibition was able to reduce inflammation and prevent the immune system from finishing off stressed neurons after stroke. The complement system is a part of the innate immune system, and one of its roles is to mark neuronal debris for cleanup in the brain.

The April announcement of a biomarker-based diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease by the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer's Association (AA) came with assurances that their recommendations were meant as a "research framework to investigate the Alzheimer's disease continuum, not as diagnostic criteria and explicitly not intended for clinical use."

A team from the British University of Cambridge has identified a molecular link between cholesterol and amyloid beta aggregation that could explain why cholesterol processing pathways are implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk by genomewide association studies (GWAS). 

AUSTIN, Texas – Indication is in the eye of the beholder.

AUSTIN, Texas – In Jeffrey Rathmell's reckoning, the modern era of immunometabolism began 25 years ago, with the demonstration that in obese individuals, fat cells will make inflammatory cytokines – an ability that was previously thought to be limited to bona fide immune cells.

Genomewide association studies (GWAS) have so far underperformed in identifying genetic contribution to disease, but they have demonstrated that most genetic contributors to complex diseases consist of small contributions of relatively common variants, rather than large contributions of rare ones. Scientists at the Finnish University of Helsinki have developed a method to calculate a polygenic risk score for such common variants and used it to identify genetic contributions to migraine risk.