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Doris Meder and Geert Van Minnebruggen had a dream to team up core facilities across the EU so that institutes could pool resources to buy state-of-the-art machines as soon as the tools became available. To that end, they founded Core for Life (C4L), a pan-European project that formally launched on 14 May. Katharine Sanderson spoke with Meder and Van Minnebruggen about how they hope to democratize access to the very latest technologies for life scientists.
Metabolic alterations, such as those caused by mutations in the enzyme isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH), define a clinically distinct subset of primary brain cancers. Expression of BCAT1 is now reported as a new metabolic change defining brain cancers without IDH mutations (pages 901–908).
Public health and research efforts directed at managing and targeting viral hepatitis have borne fruit in recent decades. However, more work is necessary to meet the goals of preventing transmission and treating infection to eliminate the enormous burden of hepatitis worldwide.
The ability to patent human genes has been costly to researchers and patients, and has restricted competition in the biotech marketplace. The recent US Supreme Court decision making isolated human genes unpatentable will bring freedom of choice to the patient, and level the playing field for research and development.
The resource-poor countries of Africa have traditionally relied on Western nations for their drug supply, but a new drug development center with a promising antimalarial agent could pave the way for a homegrown pharmaceutical pipeline. Linda Nordling investigates how this one facility at the southern tip of the continent promises to embolden an entire African drug industry.
A new wave of antivirals to fight hepatitis C infection has helped patients achieve a good quality of life, but drug resistance, side effects and a lack of pan-viral genotype coverage still remains a problem. This Review discusses current clinical studies and potential targets of the virus life cycle to tackle these issues and puts forward a paradigm to develop second-generation effective antivirals and drug combinations for achieving the ideal regimen of an all-oral, interferon-free therapeutic cocktail.
Ongoing investigational studies aim to uncover new strategies to develop an effective vaccine to prevent hepatitis C infection. Advances have moved forward vaccine candidates, but technical and biological barriers posed by the virus still exist. This Review discusses how to better design vaccine trials and evaluate key components of protective immunity to achieve a working preventive vaccine.
There is much interest in the area of cardiac regeneration to replace cardiomyocytes lost in a heart attack. A number of recent studies have shown the feasibility of direct reprogramming, which allows one cell type to be directly converted into another cell type without going through a pluripotent intermediate step. In this Review, the authors review developments in direct reprogramming to cardiac cells in vitro and in vivo and compare the utility of these methods with pluripotent stem cell–mediated approaches.
During chronic infection caused by hepatitis C and B viruses, effector adaptive immune cells are exhausted and incapable of clearing the virus, but they can still contribute to liver inflammation in this setting. This Review discusses the regulatory role of nonspecific immune natural killer (NK) cells, which, along with other immune regulatory signals, help the host counteract liver disease progression and immunopathology by controlling virus-specific immunity.