The fungus Candida auris has become an urgent clinical problem at a shocking speed. It was not even mentioned in the U.S. CDC’s 2013 reports on antimicrobial threats, but was one of five pathogens on the agency’s 2019 top-tier Urgent Threat List.

The contribution of the soluble form of urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR) as a risk factor for chronic kidney diseases (CKD) is well known. Researchers from Rush University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and collaborators have now identified D2D3, a suPAR fragment, as responsible for causing double injury, both to the kidney and pancreas, thus resulting in glomerular disease and insulin-dependent diabetes.

In the gastrointestinal tract, intraepithelial lymphocytes are tasked with protecting the epithelium against pathogens and participating in wound repair and correct mucosal barrier functioning. In a study published in the Sept. 15, 2023, issue of Science, researchers at King’s College London and collaborators have identified a specific subset of gamma-delta (γδ) T cells in the human gut, Vγ4 cells, which seems to protect against inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) progression.

From shift workers to flight attendants, disruptions in circadian rhythms are a risk factor for metabolic disorders. Several sessions held at the recent EASL meeting focused on that link, and how disturbances in the internal clock may increase the risk of hepatic disorders.

Current therapeutic options for chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) are not effective for all patient subsets and, due to their lack of specificity, often provoke toxicity and off-target effects. CD8+ T cells are essential in the fight against viruses but in chronically HBV-infected patients, these cells become unproductive and difficult to detect. At the recent Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), Matteo Iannacone, professor of Pathology and Immunology from IRCCS San Raffaele in Milano, presented a novel interleukin 2 (IL-2)-based immunotherapy approach that used a modular cis-targeting platform to tackle HBV infection specifically in patients suffering from chronic viral infection.

Chronic hepatitis B affects around 250 million people in the world and its cure remains elusive. At the 2023 European Association for the Study of the Liver Congress in Vienna, Austria, Emily Harrison of Precision Biosciences Inc. presented the company’s work on using a naturally occurring endonuclease in the development of its ARCUS gene editing approach to eradicating the persistent viral infection.

While the liver is mostly known as the core of metabolism, contributing to the storage of nutrients and excretion of toxic substances, there is an increasing interest in how it interacts with the central nervous system through the liver-brain axis. At the 2023 European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) meeting in Vienna, Austria, group leader Kristina Schoonjans and her colleague Hadrien Demagny from the Laboratory of Metabolic Signaling at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, gave talks setting out the context of inter-organ communication in liver disease, adding new findings from their research in the liver-brain axis.