Featured
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News & Views |
Genetics and anatomy sculpt immune-cell partners of ovarian cancer
The therapeutic options available to treat ovarian cancer need improvement. Data that reveal the cellular, molecular and mutational landscape as such tumours grow and spread might aid efforts to develop new targeted therapies.
- Denarda Dangaj Laniti
- & George Coukos
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News |
How sports science is neglecting female athletes
Imbalance impedes progress in prevention and treatment of injuries among female players.
- Katharine Sanderson
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Analysis
| Open AccessThe WHO estimates of excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic
Msemburi et al. describe how the World Health Organization has estimated the excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, by month and for 2020 and 2021, and analyse their estimates across the WHO member states, with 14.83 million global excess deaths estimated.
- William Msemburi
- , Ariel Karlinsky
- & Jon Wakefield
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Career Feature |
Confronting racism in Black maternal health care in the United States
Maternal-health researcher and obstetrician Kecia Gaither outlines the research needed to save more Black mothers’ lives.
- Frances Gatta
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News Feature |
How a dangerous stew of air pollution is choking the United States
Fires and droughts in the western states are getting worse — and they’re combining with industrial sources to threaten air quality and people’s health.
- Virginia Gewin
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News |
Severe COVID could cause markers of old age in the brain
Key genes that are active in the brains of older people are also active in the brains of people who developed serious COVID-19.
- Heidi Ledford
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Article
| Open AccessFXR inhibition may protect from SARS-CoV-2 infection by reducing ACE2
FXR regulates the levels of ACE2 in tissues of the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems that are affected by COVID-19, and inhibiting FXR with ursodeoxycholic acid downregulates ACE2 and reduces susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
- Teresa Brevini
- , Mailis Maes
- & Fotios Sampaziotis
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Article |
Common and rare variant associations with clonal haematopoiesis phenotypes
Exome sequence data from 628,388 individuals was used to identify 24 risk loci in 40,208 carriers of clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential and link them to other conditions including COVID-19, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
- Michael D. Kessler
- , Amy Damask
- & Eric Jorgenson
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News & Views |
A viral cocktail calms gut inflammation
Abnormalities in gut bacteria can contribute to hard-to-treat illnesses, such as inflammatory bowel diseases. Efforts to harness bacterium-targeting viruses reveal a promising way to tackle these conditions.
- Alice Bertocchi
- & Fiona Powrie
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Career Feature |
Tackle systemic racism to diversify health care and clinical research
Solving structural-racism problems in health will require everyone, from community members to heads of university departments, to be engaged.
- Virginia Gewin
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Career Feature |
Invest the time to build trust among marginalized research participants
Gaining access to Indigenous communities and offering health care in a decolonizing way can take years of respectful collaboration.
- Virginia Gewin
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News Feature |
Will pigs solve the organ crisis? The future of animal-to-human transplants
This year, surgeons transplanted the first pig organs into human recipients. Researchers are keen to launch more human trials.
- Sara Reardon
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News & Views |
A spatial perspective on bacteria in tumours
Bacteria are frequently present in human cancers. The use of state-of-the-art methods for tumour analysis that capture spatial information and single-cell molecular profiles paves the way to clarifying the roles of these microorganisms.
- Ilana Livyatan
- & Ravid Straussman
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Correspondence |
Remembering India’s pioneer in life-saving cholera treatment
- Biswa Prasun Chatterji
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News |
CRISPR cancer trial success paves the way for personalized treatments
‘Most complicated therapy ever’ tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumours.
- Heidi Ledford
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News & Views |
Spatial maps of genetically diverse breast cancer cells
The generation of spatial maps that detail molecular and genetic information for the diverse cells and tissue environment of breast tumours offers insight into the factors that drive cancer progression.
- Ghamdan Al-Eryani
- & Alexander Swarbrick
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News & Views |
Neurons that promote recovery from paralysis identified
Improved treatments for spinal-cord injury require both technological development and insights into the biology of recovery. High-resolution molecular maps of the nervous system are beginning to provide the latter.
- Kee Wui Huang
- & Eiman Azim
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News & Views |
Engineered T cells to treat lupus arrive on the scene
In an effort to treat systemic lupus erythematosus, T cells of the immune system were engineered to become cells known as CAR T cells. Their injection into people with the disease resulted in clinical and immunological improvement.
- George C. Tsokos
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Nature Index |
US agency seeks to phase out animal testing
The Food and Drug Administration commits to exploring alternative methods to replace laboratory animals in developing new drugs and products.
- Rachel Nuwer
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News |
Could a nose spray a day keep COVID away?
Scientists are working on fast-acting nasal sprays to block coronavirus infections — but formulating the sprays is a challenge.
- Max Kozlov
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Outlook |
Obstacles and opportunities: how psychedelic medicine can rise to its challenges
A panel of researchers and journalists explore the key issues health care must face as the psychedelic wave gathers momentum.
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Nature Podcast |
Racism in Health: the harms of biased medicine
In this podcast special we explore the myriad ways people have injected biases and racism into modern medicine.
- Nick Petrić Howe
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Clinical Briefing |
Preoperative immune-therapy combination shows promise in skin cancer
Treatment with the drugs relatlimab and nivolumab before the surgical removal of a type of cancer called melanoma resulted in tumours becoming inviable in 57% of individuals, and no severe adverse effects were observed. People with a favourable treatment response had a better survival outcome than did those who did not respond.
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World View |
Cancer research needs better databases
Progress on one of the world’s biggest killers will stall without big registries linking scattered records.
- T. S. Karin Eisinger-Mathason
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News |
COVID research is free to access — but for how long?
Scientific papers made free to access during the pandemic are rumoured to be disappearing behind paywalls. They aren’t — yet.
- Richard Van Noorden
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News & Views Forum |
Skin colour affects the accuracy of medical oxygen sensors
COVID-19 broadened the use of pulse oximeters for rapid blood-oxygen readings, but it also highlighted the fact that skin pigmentation alters measurements. Two groups of researchers analyse this issue, and its effects on people with dark skin.
- Matthew D. Keller
- , Brandon Harrison-Smith
- & Mohammed Shahriar Arefin
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Article |
HRG-9 homologues regulate haem trafficking from haem-enriched compartments
HRG-9 (also known as TANGO2) is an evolutionarily conserved haem chaperone that traffics haem from sites of storage or synthesis in eukaryotic cells.
- Fengxiu Sun
- , Zhenzhen Zhao
- & Caiyong Chen
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Article
| Open AccessPersonalizing exoskeleton assistance while walking in the real world
A portable ankle exoskeleton uses a data-driven method and wearable sensors to adapt to the user as they walk in a natural setting.
- Patrick Slade
- , Mykel J. Kochenderfer
- & Steven H. Collins
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Research Highlight |
‘Undruggable’ cancer-causing protein meets its match
Researchers have found a compound that can block a mutant protein linked to many tumours.
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Research Highlight |
Huge trial yields disappointing results on colonoscopy benefits
Analysis suggests that the screening method cuts risk of colorectal cancer by only a modest amount.
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Outlook |
Psychedelic research and the real world
Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs impose constraints that make it difficult to judge how effective they will be in treating people.
- Paul S. Appelbaum
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Outlook |
The psychedelic remedy for chronic pain
Drugs best known for their hallucinogenic properties, such as psilocybin, could help people beat the agony of migraines and other painful maladies.
- Clare Watson
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Article
| Open AccessPD-1-cis IL-2R agonism yields better effectors from stem-like CD8+ T cells
Binding of the PD1-IL2v immunocytokine to PD-1 and IL-2Rβγ on the same cell leads to an alternative differentiation of stem-like CD8+ T cells into better effectors rather than exhausted T cells in models of both chronic infection and cancer.
- Laura Codarri Deak
- , Valeria Nicolini
- & Pablo Umaña
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Article |
A mechanism for oxidative damage repair at gene regulatory elements
The nuclear mitotic apparatus protein NuMA helps to protect genes from oxidative damage by occupying regions around transcription start sites, binding DNA repair factors and promoting transcription following damage.
- Swagat Ray
- , Arwa A. Abugable
- & Sherif F. El-Khamisy
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News & Views |
The origins of medulloblastoma tumours in humans
How certain subgroups of a childhood brain tumour called a medulloblastoma arise has been unclear. Evidence now implicates a cell type found only in developing human brains as the originator of these tumours.
- Timothy N. Phoenix
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News Feature |
The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research
Funders and publishers are increasingly asking researchers to account for the role of sex in experiments — a requirement that’s contentious and hard to get right.
- Emily Willingham
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News |
Prehistoric child’s amputation is oldest surgery of its kind
Skeleton missing lower left leg and dated to 31,000 years ago provides the earliest known evidence for surgical limb removal.
- McKenzie Prillaman
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News & Views |
From the archive: school physics, and Shakespeare’s cause of death
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: pollution link to mental health, and museum envy
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
Could long COVID be linked to herpes viruses? Early data offer a hint
Low cortisol levels and herpes-virus reactivation are associated with prolonged COVID-19 symptoms, preliminary research suggests.
- Emily Waltz
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Article
| Open AccessBrain–phenotype models fail for individuals who defy sample stereotypes
Predictive models that relate brain activity to phenotype reliably fail when applied to subgroups of participants who do not fit stereotypical profiles, showing that the utility of a one-size-fits-all modelling approach is limited.
- Abigail S. Greene
- , Xilin Shen
- & R. Todd Constable
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Research Highlight |
Designer antiviral takes aim at one of influenza’s soft spots
Influenza A could have trouble mutating its way past a molecule that damages a crucial structure in the viral genome.
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News |
How much virus does a person with COVID exhale? New research has answers
One ‘superspreader’ with Omicron shed 1,000 times as much viral RNA as those with Alpha or Delta.
- McKenzie Prillaman
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News |
COVID rebound is surprisingly common — even without Paxlovid
Viral levels resurge in more than 10% of untreated people with COVID-19, but early data hint that the rebound is even more pronounced after antiviral treatment.
- Ewen Callaway
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News & Views |
Immune cells use hunger hormones to aid healing
Immune cells called monocytes have long been implicated in the killing of invading bacteria. However, a closer look reveals a surprising role for them: monocytes partner with a hormone to improve skin healing after bacterial infection.
- Vishwa Deep Dixit
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Article
| Open AccessDiverse mutational landscapes in human lymphocytes
Sequencing of individual human lymphocyte clones shows that they are highly prone to mutations, with higher burdens in memory cells than in naive cells arising from mutational processes associated with differentiation and tissue residency.
- Heather E. Machado
- , Emily Mitchell
- & Peter J. Campbell
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News Feature |
Long-COVID treatments: why the world is still waiting
After a slow start, researchers are beginning to test ways to combat the lasting symptoms of the disease.
- Heidi Ledford
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Article
| Open AccessDOCK2 is involved in the host genetics and biology of severe COVID-19
A genome-wide association study highlights a variant in DOCK2, which is common in East Asian populations but rare in Europeans, as a host genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19.
- Ho Namkoong
- , Ryuya Edahiro
- & Yukinori Okada