Volume 27 Issue 9, September 2021

Tracking the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, developing treatments and testing vaccines have relied on access to the health data of millions of people. This massive trove could be used to understand other diseases, but not everyone is convinced.

Young people must be involved in setting the global health agenda.

Approval of aducanumab will herald a new era in Alzheimer’s disease care and research.

Lack of rigor in approving aducanumab for Alzheimer’s disease may lead to serious harm.

Mandates and incentives are being considered to increase uptake of vaccines against COVID-19, but payment for vaccination may be the fairest approach.

Programs for treating malnutrition in children should consider how food formulations affect postnatal gut microbiome development.

Vaccines alone will not be sufficient for the eradication of malaria, which will also require investment in health professionals, better use of data, and universal access to quality health services.

Heterologous dosing with the adenovirus-based ChAdOx1 (AstraZeneca) vaccine followed by an mRNA vaccine induced stronger immune responses than did the homologous ChAdOx1 vaccine series, according to recent immunogenicity studies.

Three phase 3 studies show that an immune-checkpoint inhibitor combined with chemotherapy improves progression-free survival in recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal cancer.

Machine learning applied to electronic medical records can be used to create personalized lab-test reference ranges and to quantify disease risk, which will pave the way for precision medicine in clinical care.

The first preliminary evidence that in vivo gene editing in a clinical setting is feasible with no early signs of severe adverse events comes from an ongoing clinical trial to treat transthyretin amyloidosis, a fatal monogenetic disease.

This Review summarizes the current knowledge on key viral mutations and variants and looks to the next phase of pandemic surveillance with a focus on genotype-to-phenotype characterization.

In a study of healthcare professionals previously vaccinated with ChAdOx-1 nCoV-19, booster vaccination with BNT162b2 elicited more neutralizing antibodies with greater breadth, as well as higher frequencies of virus-specific T cells, than ChAdOx-1 nCoV-19.

In healthy adults, booster vaccination with an mRNA vaccine, irrespective of the vaccine used for the first dose, was well tolerated and elicited higher levels of spike-specific antibodies and spike-specific T cells than booster vaccination with ChAdOx1 nCov-19.

Interim analysis from the randomized phase 3 JUPITER-02 trial shows that the addition of anti-PD-1 toripalimab to standard gemcitabine/cisplatin as a first-line treatment for patients with recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma has manageable toxicity and improves progression-free survival, suggesting a potential new treatment standard in this setting.

In an interim analysis of a phase 1 trial, repeated intracranial infusions of HER2-specific CAR T cells were well tolerated with no observed dose-limiting toxicities in three young adult patients with CNS tumors.

Whole-genome sequencing of metastatic biopsies longitudinally sampled during the course of anticancer treatment reveals that the actionable metastatic cancer genome remains relatively stable over time.

The association between certain mitochondrial DNA variants and increased risk of late-onset diseases in humans could be explained by a direct role of mitochondrial DNA in the regulation of cellular proteostasis.

The inclusion of polygenic risk scores does not improve the performance of standard-of-care predictive models of disease outcomes in patients with psychosis.

A new approach based on machine-learning integration of 2.1 billion lab measurements of 92 different lab tests from 2.8 million adults, over a span of 18 years, produces models that can stratify one’s risk of having a future abnormal lab test level and subsequent emerging disease.

Microglial activation and tau accumulation propagate together in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting an interaction that determines disease progression.

Findings from a pericyte-containing cortical organoid model suggests that pericytes provide an infection portal for SARS-CoV-2 and can serve as a viral amplification hub within neural tissue.

Analysis of a prospectively enrolled cohort of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infections in Bergen, Norway, reveals a high proportion of patients who experienced long COVID symptoms at 6 months, despite being relatively young and having only mild to moderate acute COVID-19 symptoms.

A matched test-negative, case-control study using real-world data from a predominantly working-age population demonstrates efficacy of the mRNA-1273 vaccine to be 100% and 96.4% against the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) and B.1.351 (Beta) SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, respectively.

A new cluster randomized controlled trial conducted in 13 American states demonstrates that a social media advertising campaign using videos of healthcare professionals to encourage users to stay at home over the holiday season was effective in reducing travel and subsequent spread of COVID-19.

New estimates of life expectancy at birth and at age 65 years in Brazil reveal substantial declines as a result of COVID-19, bringing mortality back to levels observed 20 or more years ago.

The PfSPZ Vaccine does not protect infants from infection with Plasmodium falciparum, the major cause of malaria.

Dysregulated immune features in a patient with a homozygous loss-of-function mutation in PDCD1 suggest that IL-6, IL-23, STAT3 and RORγT might be potential targets for treatment of PD-1 blockade-induced autoimmunity.