Volume 25 Issue 7, July 2019

Researchers studying insect-borne disease hope to bring down the exorbitant cost of mosquitoes.

Dena B. Dubal is a physician–scientist and the endowed chair in aging and neurodegenerative disease in the neurology department at the University of California, San Francisco. She has received awards from the National Institutes of Health and American Federation for Aging Research.

Quorum-sensing bacteria can deliver a nanobody targeting the ‘don’t eat me’ ligand CD47 to tumors that results in systemic anti-tumor immunity-induced regression in mice.

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

Machine learning can use patients’ demographic information and previous clinical history to help physicians select the antibiotics most likely to successfully treat urinary tract infections, despite growing levels of resistance.

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.

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

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.

A deep residual learning framework identifies microsatellite instability in histology slides from patients with cancer and can be used to guide immunotherapy.

Local release of an anti-CD47 nanobody from an engineered non-pathogenic Escherichia coli strain is safe and enhances activation of tumor-infiltrating T cells, slowing tumor growth in mice.

Donor-derived, EBV-specific CD8⁺ T cells engineered to express a high-affinity WT1-specific TCR established persistent T cell responses that safely prevented post-HCT relapse in patients with high-risk AML.

Inhibition of histone and DNA methyltransferase activity enhances sensitivity to platinum-based and immunotherapy in a novel transgenic mouse model of metastatic bladder cancer.

Typhoid toxin is not essential for the pathogenesis of typhoid fever in healthy humans challenged with Salmonella Typhi.

Exposure to a farm-like house dust microbiome is associated with protection against asthma development in children living in urban environments.

Supplementation with Akkermansia muciniphila, a gut microbe previously associated with metabolic health in preclinical models, is safe and well tolerated in humans and may improve metabolic parameters in overweight and obese patients.

A closer look at the gut microbiome of elite marathon runners unveils a microbe-encoded enzymatic process that contributes to enhanced athletic performance.

Immunoglobulin A antibodies in maternal milk are required for prevention of necrotizing enterocolitis in preterm neonates.

A recurrent gain-of-function mutation in ARAF causes lymphatic anomaly in two unrelated patients, and treating one of the patients with an FDA-approved MEK inhibitor resulted in a remarkable recovery, exemplifying the power of precision medicine.

Screening of Cas9 and gRNA combinations identifies the variant SaCas9-KKH that selectively disrupts the mutant Tmc1/TMC1 allele that causes hearing loss, prevents deafness and preserves inner-ear hair cell function in Tmc1 mutant Beethoven mice.

Zinc finger protein transcription factors are developed for the selective silencing of the mutant huntingtin gene in human neurons in vitro and multiple animal models of Huntington’s disease in vivo while preserving expression of the wild-type allele.

On the basis of the personalized data of over 300,000 individuals with urinary tract infections, a machine-learning algorithm can help select an antibiotic for treatment of a urinary tract infection to which the infecting pathogen is not already resistant.

Single-cell transcriptomics reveals immune and stromal compartment remodeling, including the enrichment of unique populations of epithelial cells and CD4⁺ T cells, in asthmatic lungs

Bacteriotherapy using gut-derived bacteria from healthy human infants, but not infants with food allergies, suppresses food allergy symptoms in mice via induction of Foxp3 + Rorγt + regulatory T cells