Volume 26 Issue 4, April 2020

A seasoned public-health institute puts Nigeria in a good position to respond to COVID-19, although there are area-specific challenges to be addressed. Nature Medicine reports from Nigeria.

Rickie Patani is Professor of Human Stem Cells and Regenerative Neurology at University College London and The Francis Crick Institute, and is a consultant neurologist at The National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square, London. He has over a decade of experience using human stem cell models of neurodegeneration, and his research contributions have been recognized by the International Paulo Gontijo Award in Medicine and the International 3Rs prize.

The opioid epidemic in the USA has brought many to examine their antiquated understanding of addiction, which has led to the professionalization of addiction medicine. How can translational researchers learn from these cross-cutting specialists to open new avenues for discovery?

There is a pervasive problem in academia of principal investigators who abuse their powers and mistreat their trainees. Here I share suggestions that would help protect the trainees and ultimately reduce the number of toxic supervisors.

COVID-19 has affected vulnerable populations disproportionately across China and the world. Solid social and scientific evidence to tackle health inequity in the current COVID-19 pandemic is in urgent need.

The past decade has allowed the development of a multitude of digital tools. Now they can be used to remediate the COVID-19 outbreak.

Vannevar Bush enshrined the ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research dichotomy on which much of science policy is still built 75 years later. However, it is time to assess whether this vision for science best serves the purposes of medical research and physician-scientists in the 21st century.

Large-scale collection of data could help curb the COVID-19 pandemic, but it should not neglect privacy and public trust. Best practices should be identified to maintain responsible data-collection and data-processing standards at a global scale.

A trial of a therapeutic vaccine against HIV induces cellular immunity and, although it provides hope, it highlights the hurdles for the development of such strategies.

Trans-ethnic study shows promise in the identification of genetic commonalities and differences for the contribution of traits to lifespan across genetically diverse populations.

Analysis of the intestinal content of fetuses suggests very limited bacterial colonization with potential immunological roles, which opens new research questions.

Novel RNA-targeting antisense therapy is shown to reduce lipoprotein(a) levels in 286 patients with existing atherosclerotic disease by upwards of 80% in a phase 2 clinical trial.

Neoadjuvant checkpoint blockade achieves deep or complete pathologic responses in patients with mismatch-repair-deficient and mismatch-repair-proficient early colon cancer.

The emerging success of neoadjuvant therapy is creating opportunities for understanding successful immune responses and improving therapies using this unique pool of knowledge.

Test of therapeutic mosaic vaccines in HIV-infected individuals shows no control of virus after treatment interruption.

Children infected with the COVID-19 outbreak coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, show mild symptoms but prolonged shedding of viral RNA in feces, suggesting that the fecal–oral route might play a role in virus transmission.

An estimation of the clinical severity of COVID-19, based on the data available so far, can help to inform the public health response during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing of blood from HIV-1-infected individuals obtained before initiation of antiretroviral therapy provides insights into the initial immune responses during early infection that might shape future outcomes.

Immune checkpoint blockade has been proposed as a potentially curative strategy to reduce the HIV reservoir. Studies in monkeys now show that this approach alone is ineffective at enabling viral control after antiretroviral treatment interruption.

Distinct patterns of exposure to a first-line tuberculosis drug in separate lung lesions within patients are revealed by PET–CT imaging. Use of the technique might help optimize the duration and dosing of antimicrobial drugs.

A single therapeutic base edit of the BCL11A enhancer in human HSPCs can ameliorate cellular defects associated with sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia in vitro and efficiently induce fetal hemoglobin expression upon engraftment in mice in vivo.

Cross-biobank analysis reveals that polygenic risk scores (PRS) for hypertension and obesity are associated with shorter lifespan, serving as a proof-of-principle that PRS could pinpoint causal risk factors that affect long-term health outcomes.

In a large and prospective cohort, higher polygenic risk is associated with higher risk and earlier age of onset for cardiometabolic disorders and cancer, and has added value to clinical risk scores in clinical disease prediction.

A new cross-validated neuroimaging biomarker that reflects striatal dysfunctioning can be used to distinguish patients with schizophrenia from healthy controls, and is associated with treatment response to antipsychotics.

Results from the NICHE study show remarkable pathological responses to neoadjuvant combination immunotherapy in patients with early-stage colon cancer and uncover potential biomarkers of response.

Integrative analysis in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma uncovers that biallelic mutations on TMEM30A are associated with a favorable outcome and enhanced sensitivity to CD47 blockade.

A proof-of-concept clinical study shows that perturbations to the gut microbiome affect nutrient absorption in humans.

Microscopy and 16S rRNA sequencing suggest that there is a limited bacterial presence in the human fetal intestine, with one enriched Micrococcus species exhibiting immunomodulatory activity ex vivo.

In germ-free mice colonized with human microbiota, mucosal IL-22 signaling promotes the growth of succinate-consuming commensal bacteria via host mucus glycosylation, and transplantation of these bacteria limits Clostridioides difficile infection.

Simultaneous single-cell protein and transcriptome analysis identifies a baseline immune circuit associated with antibody responses to vaccination in healthy individuals and the severity of disease flares in patients with a subtype of systemic lupus erythematosus.