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From policy advisors who resigned in protest to an agency trying to settle a patent dispute, many of the newsmakers in our 2017 Yearbook made notable decisions.
From a worldwide march in favor of science to an increased focus on diversity and gender equality in the workplace, 2017 was a year that was dominated by activism and social causes. Amidst these events, however, were concerns over unproven treatments and emergency funding.
In 2017, cancer drugs once again dominated the news, with many of these medications making headlines for being the first of their kind to gain approval. Beyond cancer, drugs for inflammatory diseases also received attention, for both their successes and their failures.
Better animal models of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis are needed to more fully understand the disease and to identify potential new therapeutic treatments for this increasingly common condition.
This past year included numerous research studies that broke the mold and elucidated new biology and drug targets. Here are some of the exciting papers from 2017 that moved biomedicine forward.
Genetic association studies of the human genome often omit the X chromosome because of the unique analytical challenges it presents. A concerted effort to undo this exclusion could offer medically relevant insights into basic biology that might otherwise be missed.
A growing number of clinical trials on combination therapies raises the question of to what degree they may be redundant. Systems biology and hypothesis-driven preclinical studies could help to identify the most promising candidates for clinical trials, and also offer new insights into the biological mechanisms that underlie drug synergies.
Drugs administered to children with cancer were typically developed under the assumption that childhood cancers are similar to their tissue-matched adult counterparts. Focusing on identifying and targeting alterations present specifically in childhood tumors will accelerate the development of tailored therapies and improve the prognosis of children with cancer.
Recent evidence shows that both acute and chronic infections can persist in tissue reservoirs that act as a source of subsequent disease. Identifying the parallels of reservoir maintenance by diverse pathogens might offer new leads to enable their control.