The response to stress is controlled by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and dysfunction of the HPA axis induced by chronic stress puts individuals at risk of a variety of psychiatric as well as physiological conditions.
Factor XI, a coagulation factor that is part of the intrinsic blood clotting pathway, is part of a newly discovered circuit that links coagulation, inflammation and hypertension. Researchers described the circuit, which breaks ground scientifically as well as offering potential therapeutic strategies to treat often-co-morbid diseases, in the Feb. 1, 2017, issue of Science Translational Medicine.
In a situation analogous to BRCA-mutated tumors, isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutations led to defects in DNA damage repair and rendered tumor cells vulnerable to poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors, researchers have reported.
The cell surface protein CD99 is expressed on cancer stem cells in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and the myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), and it could serve as both a marker and a therapeutic target in those disorders.
Basic developmental biology and organ transplantation both got a boost this week, with two groups reporting progress in generating chimeras, and generating medically useful cell types using those chimeras.
In 2012, BioWorld named the disconnect between science and clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as one of the top 10 stories of the year. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 27, 2012.)
Researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to image chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in patients by adding a positron emission tomography (PET) reporter gene to glioma-targeting cells. The same team had previously shown that in a single patient, such CAR T cells could be visualized after an autologous transplant, but due to constraints of the study protocol, it was not possible to take a baseline reading. In the current phase I study, the researchers treated seven patients with reporter gene-containing CAR T cells and showed that they could track the infused cells, though the study was not powered to relate cell uptake into tumors to clinical outcome.
Tumor heterogeneity, the diverging evolution of both different subparts of primary tumors and of metastases compared to the primary tumor, is often named among the challenges for targeted treatment.
Inhibiting the Axl kinase could have applications in both antitumor and antiviral therapy, separate papers published over the past few weeks have reported. In the Jan. 10, 2017, issue of Cell Reports, a team from the French INSERM Institute showed that Axl receptor activity both enabled Zika virus entry into cells and modulated innate immune responses.
Tumor cells could induce autophagy in neighboring cells of the microenvironment and use resulting macromolecules for their own nutritional gains, and early stage tumors were dependent on microenvironmental autophagy for their growth.
