Reviews & Analysis

The clinical translation of stem-cell-based therapeutic interventions has its own ethical and policy challenges requiring collaboration among wide-ranging stakeholders.

The prevalence of excess weight gain is increasing more rapidly in rural than in urban environments. Increased intake of ultra-processed foods has been associated with obesity, and the rise of supermarkets and marketing strategies may have contributed to the greater weight increases in rural areas.

Heat-inactivated Akkermansia muciniphila helps alleviate features of metabolic syndrome in overweight and obese subjects.

The TRANSNEURO Consortium shares valuable insights that may facilitate planning of human pluripotent stem-cell-derived dopamine cell transplants for future clinical trials on Parkinson’s disease.

The combination of BRAF and MEK inhibition and anti-PD-1 is tolerable and has promising efficacy, which warrants further investigation into its use as melanoma therapy.

Assessment of more than 400,000 people over the age of 40 demonstrates that homozygosity for a CCR5 variant that prevents HIV-1 infection comes at the cost of increased rates of mortality.

Germline gene therapy has the potential to prevent inheritance of monogenic disorders but must first be optimized for accuracy.

Advances in cellular regeneration and technical approaches to spinal cord repair are on the verge of being translated into clinical trials.

The diversity of the vaginal microbiome is linked to ethnicity, preterm birth and transitions to a healthier profile upon pregnancy.

Using the principles of community ecology in microbiome research will help to interpret these dynamic ecosystems and their relevance to health and disease.

Multi-omics longitudinal profiling of individuals can detect subtle changes in health status at the earliest possible time point, allowing preemptive initiation of mechanism-appropriate disease-prevention strategies.

The use and promotion of probiotics is widespread, but debatable in many cases. Prospective large-scale randomized studies that assess their effectiveness in promoting health and curing disease and take into account personalized responses of discrete human subpopulations will help clarify specific indications in which probiotics may be safe and beneficial.

Human survivors of Ebola virus disease are more likely than uninfected controls to develop memory loss, uveitis, and other abnormal conditions, and Ebola virus remains in semen much longer than previously thought.

Three innovative precision medicine studies show the utility of evidence beyond that from tumor DNA sequencing to guide therapy in patients with cancer.

A new drug restores a compromised intestinal barrier and ameliorates colitis in mice by modulating paracellular permeability through a newly discovered mechanism.

Broadly neutralizing antibodies have the potential to clear HIV and prevent further infection, as shown in emerging clinical studies.

A large study provides causal evidence of the opposing effects of plasma low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels on ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke in a Chinese population and suggests there is a a net benefit associated with LDL lowering.

Improved protocols for the visualization of immature neurons in the human brain provide evidence for generation of neurons in the adult hippocampus and uncover reduced neurogenesis in Alzheimer’s disease.

Application of immunoprofiling of human peripheral blood samples from an aging cohort identifies changes in the immune system that inform our understanding of age-associated complex diseases.

Transcriptional signatures and immune cell infiltrates associated with immune activation distinguish patients with glioblastoma who initially respond to immune checkpoint blockade from those who do not.