Volume 29 Issue 3, March 2023

Nature Medicine explores the latest translational and clinical research news, with data from an ongoing clinical trial of mosunetuzumab in relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma.

Several hundred community health workers offer telehealth services that put women in underserved communities in touch with doctors.

There is abundant evidence that e-cigarettes can help some individuals to quit smoking, so they should be more widely recommended as smoking cessation aids.

The US Food and Drug Administration should address health misinformation through existing and new regulatory approaches, including modernizing product labeling, investing in infodemic surveillance and addressing the roles of the internet and social media.

The expansion of digital health comes with benefits, but also potential harms, including those to economic, psychological and societal wellbeing. This article presents a framework to characterize cyber harms so that they can be prevented and mitigated.

Generative artificial intelligence tools such as chatGPT have many uses in medicine, but a lack of accuracy poses problems.

The NEOSTAR trial is a key step on route to better outcomes; but the best approach is likely to be an individualized one, reflecting the many factors that influence treatment response.

Epidural spinal cord stimulation improved upper limb function in two participants after stroke, revealing a potentially exciting new tool for stroke recovery.

High-resolution meta-omics have enabled the discovery of the microbial enzymes that inactivate an ulcerative colitis drug and predict subsequent treatment failure, an approach that could enable more personalized treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.

The widely used artificial sweetener erythritol affects platelet function and is associated with major cardiovascular events — fuelling calls for a re-evaluation of the use and regulation of non-nutritive sweeteners.

Using a systems-level, multi-omics approach, we reveal several genes associated with arachnoid cysts and identify four phenotypic subtypes of arachnoid cysts, the severity of which correlates with the presence of protein-damaging de novo variants. All candidate genes are expressed in the developing brain and encode molecules implicated in chromatin modification or transcriptional regulation.

We developed a compact database, called a ‘Rareservoir’, that contains the rare variant genotypes and phenotypes of 34,523 patients with a rare disease and 43,016 unaffected relatives. We inferred 260 genetic associations with rare disease classes, of which 19 were previously unidentified, and validated etiological roles for ERG, PMEPA1 and GPR156.

Using observational data from over 200,000 participants with up to 32 years of follow-up, we compared the strengths of eight healthy dietary patterns for general health. We found that diets that lowered hyperinsulinemia, chronic inflammation and diabetes risk may offer the greatest protection against chronic diseases.

We describe a 53-year-old man with HIV-1 who received allogeneic CCR5Δ32/Δ32 hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in 2013 to treat acute myeloid leukemia. Four years after analytic treatment interruption (ATI), the absence of viral rebound and the lack of immunological correlates of HIV-1 antigen persistence provide convincing evidence for HIV-1 cure.

To meet a current unmet medical need, we generated 15 genetically engineered mouse models that accurately reflect the key pathogenetic aspects of human multiple myeloma. By coupling mechanistic investigations and pre-clinical immunotherapy testing, these pre-clinical platforms provide knowledge that will aid the optimization of future immunotherapy clinical trial design.

Cardiometabolic health is tightly linked to diet and the gut microbiome. This Review explains how meta-omics technologies are revealing the intricate links between them and discusses the most promising paths to clinical translation.

This Review surveys the NASH clinical trial landscape and the main challenges to drug approval, and discusses new approaches to overcoming these, including innovative trial designs, non-invasive tests and biomarkers.

Neutralizing antibody titers elicited by either ancestral or bivalent COVID-19 vaccine boosters are predicted to increase protection against severe disease due to SARS-CoV-2 variants.

With the lifting of the zero-COVID policy and requirements governing reporting case numbers in China, it has become imperative to estimate the dynamics and cumulative infection rate of SARS-CoV-2 to help guide public health responses.

The recipient of an allogeneic stem cell transplant from a CCR5Δ32/Δ32 donor shows evidence of HIV type 1 cure, including the absence of a viral rebound over 4 years after stopping antiretroviral treatment.

High-dose ipilimumab plus nivolumab in locoregionally advanced urothelial cancer led to a higher pathological complete response rate than low-dose ipilimumab in cohort 2. Presurgical absence of plasma (but not urinary) circulating tumor DNA correlated with clinical outcome.

The combination of neoadjuvant nivolumab, ipilimumab and chemotherapy showed promising efficacy in patients with resectable non-small cell lung cancer, with higher tumor immune cell infiltration and tertiary lymphoid structures after treatment compared with neoadjuvant nivolumab plus chemotherapy.

A combination of real-world evidence and a reanalysis of phase 3 clinical trial data unveils KRAS codon G12 mutations as a biomarker of resistance to trifluridine/tipiracil in metastatic colorectal cancer.

The dual IDH1/IDH2 inhibitor vorasidenib exhibited better brain permeability and target engagement than ivosidenib in a pilot perioperative randomized clinical trial in patients with IDH1-mutant glioma.

Analysis of a longitudinal cohort revealed that only 72% of Chinese adults aged 60 years and older received a booster coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination by July 2022, with contraindications, advanced age and living with chronic conditions being the main determinants of vaccine hesitancy in this population.

New experimental models provide much-needed tools for understanding how genetically diverse multiple myeloma progresses and evolves in response to therapy.

Clinical, genomic and transcriptomic analyses of paired samples of synchronous bilateral female breast cancer identify associations between tumor concordance and immune infiltrates levels and response to neoadjuvant treatment.

A new multilevel clustering approach applied retrospectively to 13,000 transcriptomes of different tumors reveals a new diagnostic classification of childhood cancers, in some cases allowing a better prediction of disease outcomes.

In a cohort of patients with cerebral arachnoid cysts, multiomic analyses reveal de novo variants causing genetic neurodevelopmental conditions in up to 16% of cases, suggesting that surgery in these cases may not improve non-mass effect-related symptoms.

A flexible and compact database containing rare variant genotypes and phenotypes of 77,539 participants sequenced by the 100,000 Genomes Project enables the identification of new disease-causing genes.

Electrical stimulation of cervical spinal circuits facilitates arm and hand movements in two participants with moderate and severe chronic post-stroke hemiparesis.

A novel multi-omics workflow, combining gut microbiome metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metabolomics, enabled the identification of the microbial pathways responsible for the degradation of the immunomodulatory drug 5-ASA in the gut of patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

Metabolomics analyses reported an increased risk of cardiovascular disease associated with the artificial sweetener erythritol, supported by mechanistic studies showing that high levels of erythritol enhanced platelet reactivity and thrombosis formation.

Analyses of eight dietary patterns revealed that adherence to low insulinemic, low inflammatory or diabetes risk-reducing diets was associated with the largest risk reduction of cardiometabolic diseases and cancer in US men and women.

The potential of evinacumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting angiopoietin-like 3, for reducing triglyceride levels was tested in patients with severe hypertriglyceridemia due to differing genetic etiologies.

A deep-learning algorithm was developed to identify skin lesions caused by the mpox virus and was then implemented in a web-based app designed for patient use.

Effectiveness of one subcutaneous dose of MVA-BN, the smallpox and mpox vaccine, was estimated to be 86% in a cohort of vaccine-eligible males in Israel, supporting its use to curtail the outbreak of mpox virus.