Volume 22 Issue 6, June 2016

As drug prices have increased, there is also greater pressure to find ways to ensure access to medicines. An existing provision of the Bayh-Dole Act could help to lower costs for qualifying drugs in federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

A new study of the impact of cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) escape mutations suggests that holes in the host immune repertoire contribute to poor disease outcomes, owing to a gradual deterioration of the host anti-HIV-1 immune response. This should be accounted for in HIV-1 vaccine development strategies.

Two new studies in mice show that the gut microbiota produces metabolites from dietary tryptophan that regulate inflammation in the gut and central nervous system.

A new study in humans links genetic variants associated with schizophrenia to changes in the expression of two genes, arsenite methyltransferase (AS3MT) and BLOC-1 related complex subunit 7 (BORCS7). Subsequent investigations provide compelling evidence that AS3MT is involved in the etiology of schizophrenia.

A recent study shows that skeletal muscle responds to tumor-secreted factors by undergoing a change in fatty acid metabolism, and that blocking this metabolic response in mice inhibits muscle wasting.

After upregulation of AHR in astrocytes by type I interferons, commensal-microbe-derived metabolites of dietary tryptophan act on astrocytes to suppress CNS inflammation.

Metabolism of tryptophan by the gut microbiota is impaired by deficiencies in CARD9, leading to the worsening of colitis.

Jonathan Carlson and colleagues report that pre-adaptation of HIV to a recipient's major histocompatibility complex class I alleles impairs immune control of the virus.

Fifty-five percent of individuals vaccinated with an attenuated Plasmodium falciparum sporozoite vaccine remained without parasitemia after controlled human malaria infection one year later; immune correlate analysis in humans and non-human primates suggest a role for liver-resident T cells.

The cancer therapeutic cetuximab blocks EGFR signaling on tumor cells. Pozzi et al. now show that this antibody, when combined with chemotherapy, can also kill colorectal cancer cells by triggering immunogenic cell death.

Conditional expression of the most common somatic gain-of-function Ezh2 mutation in mouse models of melanoma and lymphoma reveals insight into its cooperation with other oncogenic events and its effects on the epigenome.

Aberrant coupling between hippocampal interictal discharges and neocortical spindle oscillations triggers the generation of cortical ‘down’ states in both a rodent epilepsy model and human patients with focal epilepsy. In rats, this pathological network activity is shown to impair cognitive function.

eQTL analysis of human brain RNA-seq data targeted to genes within the 10q24.32 schizophrenia-associated locus reveals that the risk SNP in this region is selectively associated with expression of BORCS7 and a human-specific isoform of AS3MT across multiple independent samples. Expression of only the associated AS3MT isoform is higher in tissue from humans with schizophrenia than in healthy controls.

The pluripotency factor OCT4 is expressed in smooth muscle cells of atherosclerotic lesions in both mice and humans, and has atheroprotective effects in mice.

Cachexia-inducing tumors release complex factors that promote the increased uptake and burning of fats by muscle, resulting in muscle atrophy—a process that can be blocked if fatty acid oxidation is pharmacologically inhibited.

Leukemias bearing heterozygous mutations in the SRSF2 splicing-factor-encoding gene can be therapeutically targeted by pharmacologic inhibition of residual spliceosome function.

Fixed-tissue chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (FiT-seq) enables accurate detection of histone marks on chromatin extracted from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples.