Animal studies suggest that innate immune system cells may help mutant tau protein spread through the brains of patients with neurodegenerative disease. Tau-containing vesicles secreted by microglia appear to be instrumental for propagating tau tangles between different brain areas.
Tomas Lindahl, of the British Francis Crick Institute, Paul Modrich, of Duke University School of Medicine, and Aziz Sancar, of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, jointly won the 2015 Nobel prize in chemistry "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair."
CCR5’s claim to fame in the clinical world is that it is a co-receptor that HIV uses to enter T cells, and that cells with two copies of a particular CCR5 variant, CCR5-delta32, are naturally resistant to HIV.
Scientists from Merck Research Laboratories have identified a synthetic molecule that was able to interfere with bacterial growth by interfering with a regulatory RNA sequence.
By sampling the gut microbiome early in life, researchers have shown that four types of commensal microbes, and the metabolites those microbes produced, were present at lower levels in children at high risk of developing asthma when those children were 3 months old.
CRISPR Therapeutics co-founder Emmanuelle Charpentier was among those named as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates this week, "researchers whose work has achieved quantifiable esteem and impact in the scientific community, at a level far beyond the norm. This attainment, demonstrated in the elevated quantity of highly cited papers written by these select researchers, signals that they are "of Nobel class" and "likely to earn the Nobel someday."
A team from the Portuguese Institute Gulbenkian has shown that leptin stimulated white fat breakdown via actions on nerve fibers that directly innervated fat tissue. Leptin is a satiety hormone and was once tested for the treatment of obesity, but those trials were unsuccessful, as it is leptin resistance rather than a lack of leptin that contributes to obesity.
SAN DIEGO – Infectious diseases have a hard time getting any love from the biopharma community. And historically, antifungals have had a hard time getting any love from the infectious disease community.
Researchers have developed a small-molecule "on" switch for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that allowed them, in preclinical models, to control the cells' activity after transplantation.
