The shunt towards, or away from, cognitive decline may happen decades before such decline becomes clinically evident. And known risk factors explain very little of that decline. That is the conclusion reached by researchers from the Ohio State University, who published their results in the Feb. 8, 2023, issue of PLOS ONE.

In their analysis, the team looked at both the absolute level of cognitive function in about 7,000 participants of the U.S. Health and Retirement Study at age 54, and at the decline in cognitive function from age 54 to 85. The study participants that were analyzed were born between 1931 and 1941. The results were reminiscent of the adage that the way to make a silk purse out a sow’s ear is to start with a silk sow.

Researchers have developed an algorithm that was able to create functional enzymes from scratch after being trained with the amino acid sequences of existing enzymes in the same class. Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco described their method online in Nature Biotechnology on Jan. 26, 2023. The method, which its creators have named Progen, can generate “protein sequences with a predictable function across large protein families,” according to the authors.

Metabolic health is at an odd juncture. With the advent of glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists, pharmacologically induced weight loss has matured into a viable therapeutic option at long last. GLP-1R agonists, which are also called incretin mimetics and GLP-1 analogs, are likely to continue their success across multiple areas of medical care. Already, the class has transformed diabetes care, making a splash in weight management, and it may yet do the same for other indications.

By applying deep learning methods to a large database of zinc finger nucleases, researchers at the University of Toronto and New York University have developed an algorithm, Zfdesign, that was able to design custom zinc fingers for any given stretch of DNA. “I think this system levels the playing field for zinc fingers and CRISPR,” said Philip Kim, co-corresponding author of the team's paper published online in Nature Biotechnology on Jan. 26, 2023.

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have been able to identify proteins that were released from muscles during exercise in relatively small quantities. Using their method, the team was able to demonstrate that the neurotrophic factor prosaposin was produced during exercise. Prosaposin is “a well-known CNS neurotrophic factor, but has never been seen to come out of muscle or fat,” Bruce Spiegelman told BioWorld. Spiegelman is a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a method to measure several thousand metabolites, including proteins, metabolites, inflammatory markers such as cytokines and, to a degree, lipids. “It’s like Theranos, except it works,” corresponding author Michael Snyder, director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford Medicine, told BioWorld.

Researchers at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology’s Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and Pulmobiotics Ltd. have used one bacterium to fight another. In mouse models, the team used engineered Mycoplasma pneumoniae to treat Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the chief culprit in ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).

Pulmobiotics Ltd., which was founded in 2019, is developing cell therapy for lung diseases, including lung cancer. But unlike other cell therapies for cancer, this one is based not on harnessing T cells but on engineering bacteria. The team has engineered Mycoplasma pneumoniae to deliver various therapeutic proteins to the lung, depending on the therapeutic indication.