Being a little bit infected with HIV may sound like a concept akin to being a little bit pregnant. But that may be what's behind the functional cure of a baby with HIV that had both the scientific community and the general public abuzz last week.

Much of the media attention surrounding the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta this week surrounded a single case report, of a toddler that was functionally cured of HIV through rapid and aggressive treatment starting within days after birth.

In the March 3, 2013, online edition of Nature Medicine, scientists from Portola Pharmaceuticals Inc. reported on its PRT064445, a recombinant and "ever so slightly engineered" version of Factor Xa that the company hopes will become a universal antidote to next-generation anti-clotting drugs.

By targeting one specific type of inhibitory brain receptor, researchers have been able to improve neural function and memory in a mouse model of Down syndrome. The findings give additional support to the idea that some neurodevelopmental disorders can be reversed, at least partially, after they are established.

BOSTON – Cross-disciplinary research is all the rage these days, for good reason. "It's widely agreed that creativity and innovation are combinatorial processes," Sarah Kaplan of the University of Toronto told the audience at the panel on "Confluence of Streams of Knowledge: Biotechnology and Nanotechnology" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in February. "Ideas ignore boundaries," including the boundaries of academic disciplines.

BOSTON – The parable of the blind men and the elephant is sometimes applied to whole genome sequencing. But at a lively session on "The Science of Uncertainty in Genomic Medicine" James Evans of the University of North Carolina told his audience that there is also a personal finance rule about elephants that is apt when considering the clinical use of genomic information.

Memory T cells, because of the sheer speed with which they can respond to an infection, are "the best thing you can have" to protect against a disease, Mark Davis told BioWorld Today. But memory appears to be a misnomer: Davis and his team have shown that every one of more than 20 individuals had memory T cells to viruses they had never been exposed to.

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have discovered that by targeting a bacterial transporter Staphylococcus aureus uses to export its toxins, they were able to not only reduce S. aureus virulence, but to kill the bacterium outright.

At least with mouse models of inflammation, there's apparently no concern about what conclusions are legitimate to draw from a correlation between those models and inflammation in humans.

The current thinking about mutations in cancer cells holds that there are two types – driver mutations that are behind cancer growth because they give tumor cells a growth advantage, and passenger mutations that are along for the ride. "Historically, passenger mutations have been largely ignored," Leonid Mirny told BioWorld Today, because cancer development is seen largely as "a series of unfortunate events" in the form of accumulating driver mutations.