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Recent ballot initiatives instituting a tax on sugary drinks in the US, alongside related efforts by other countries and support from the World Health Organization, bring to the forefront the need for greater scientific insight into how sugars affect metabolic health.
From tech billionaires turned medical philanthropists to a crusader for improved drug safety, our list of newsmakers this year includes a number of hyper-ambitious individuals.
This past year saw breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene editing to eye-tissue repair. Here are a few of the research papers that reported some of the exciting discoveries of 2016.
Gene therapies featured prominently among this year's newsworthy drugs, some of which have already received a green light from regulatory agencies for sale or are otherwise surging forward in trials. Other drugs ended the year with a much less rosy efficacy or safety profile.
From an alarming global health emergency to an increased focus on antibiotic resistance, 2016 was a year replete with attention on infectious disease. But the year also included events ranging from clinical trials gone horribly awry to calls for expanded access to marijuana for research.
The quest to improve influenza vaccines is aided by research into the immune response that they generate. Two recent studies have focused their attention on the specificities of antibodies induced after vaccination with conventional inactivated influenza vaccines.
A recent study shows that spermidine has beneficial effects on health and lifespan in mice, and that these effects are the result of improved cardiovascular function. Similar effects of spermidine on humans are supported by epidemiological studies.
Tumors continue to escape therapies that target single signaling pathways. A recent study in mice shows that combination immunotherapy involving different arms of immune response can overcome this and cure intractable tumors.
Cancer-derived induced pluripotent stem cells provide a new opportunity to model the effects of the cancer genome. In this Perspective, Eirini Papapetrou discusses the future applications of these cells for cancer modeling and therapeutic understanding.
An immunotherapy consisting of a tumor-antigen targeting antibody, PD-1 blocking antibody, extended half-life recombinant IL-2 and a lymph-node-targeted T cell vaccine mobilized innate and adaptive immunity and eradicated large established tumors in a variety of mouse models.
Blockade of cIAP1 and cIAP2 induces a tumor cell-autonomous type-I IFN response that activates myeloid cells and potentiates anti-tumor immunity in pre-clinical models and patients with multiple myeloma.
Using induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with familial dysautonomia, the authors show that in vitro models can recapitulate patient-specific differences in disease severity.
Spermidine, a naturally occurring polyamine, extends the lifespan of mice and is cardioprotective in both aged mice and hypertensive rats. In humans, high dietary spermidine intake is associated with reduced blood pressure and a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease.
Surender Khurana and colleagues analyzed the antibody repertoire in healthy individuals after vaccination against Ebola virus using a VSV-Ebola vaccine and identify a strong contribution of IgM antibodies to the virus-neutralizing response.
Both rhesus and cynomolgus macaques are susceptible to subcutaneous infection with Zika virus; longitudinal studies of infected animals provide information about the temporal dynamics of Zika virus in distinct cells, tissues and body fluids, as well as the immune response to the virus.
Antibodies that bind to both H1 and H3 influenza strains exist in the pre-vaccination serum repertoire of healthy adults; most vaccine-elicited clonotypes bind either H1 or H3 strains.
Antibodies elicited by vaccination with influenza vaccine produced in eggs bind more strongly to the egg-adapted vaccine strain than to wild-type circulating strains.
Ram Savan and colleagues report that two miRNAs known to suppress type 3 interferon (IFN) signaling also downregulate type 1IFN signaling in hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected hepatocytes. The findings provide insights into the mechanisms by which antiviral IFN signaling is inhibited in HCV infection.
Analysis of T cells isolated from patients with and without type 1 diabetes reveals reactivity to a range of native as well as post-translationally modified self-antigens only in individuals with T1D.
AML cells carrying R882 mutations in DNMT3A fail to sense and repair DNA damage induced by standard-dose chemotherapy as a result of impaired chromatin remodeling
Selective pharmacological blockade of forebrain excitatory AMPA receptors that express the TARP γ-8 subunit enables antiepileptic therapy in rodent models of epilepsy without inducing motor impairments associated with currently used antiepileptic drugs.
