Category Health/Medical

Amyloid plaque reduction with aducanumab: example amyloid PET images at baseline and week 54. Axial slice shows anatomical regions in posterior brain putatively related to Alzheimer’s disease pathology

The researchers furthermore demonstrated in an early stage clinical study that, after 1 year of treatment with Aducanumab, cognitive decline could be significantly slowed in antibody-treated patients as opposed to the placebo group. Although the causes of Alzheimer’s disease are still unknown, it is clear that the disease commences with progressive amyloid deposition in the brains of affected persons between 10 to 15 years before the emergence of initial clinical symptoms such as memory loss...

Highlights •atRA deficiency in colon cancer is driven by microbiota-induced inflammation •Treatment with atRA reduces tumorigenesis by enhancing a CD8+ T cell response •The enhanced CD8+ T cell response is due to upregulation of MHCI on tumor cells •CD8+ T cell cytotoxicity in human colon cancer correlates with local atRA metabolism

Mice with the cancer have lower-than-normal levels of the metabolite in their gut. Furthermore, colorectal cancer patients whose intestinal tissues express high levels of a protein that degrades retinoic acid tend to fare more poorly than their peers. The research is the first to unravel a complicated dance between retinoic acid levels, immune-related inflammation and gut microorganisms...

The source of alcohol craving may be a pea-sized structure deep inside the right side of the brain. The brain scans showed that the beer flavor induced more activity in both frontal lobes and in the right ventral striatum of the subjects’ brains than did the sports drink. Credit: B. Oberlin and D. Kareken, Indiana University School of Medicine

If you really want a drink right now, the source of your craving may be a pea-sized structure deep inside the right side of your brain, according to scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Using PET and fMRI, the researchers compared the results of giving beer drinkers a taste of their favorite beer versus a sports drink...

Lambert, Lucia and Gari (left to right) unpack the mechanism of investigational drug, AMPI-109, to show how its inactivation of PRL-3 flips an important switch on triple-negative breast cancer.

A new study offers compelling evidence that enzyme PRL-3 is ‘switch’ in TNF-R1 pathway, determining whether pathway helps cancer cells survive or die when challenged with immunotherapy. Previous studies at the University of Colorado Cancer Center show that the experimental drug AMPI-109 potently kills triple-negative breast cancer cells. But even the most compelling evidence of cell death in a dish isn’t enough to push a drug into human clinical trials, even for triple-negative breast cancer, which has a high mortality rate and remains largely without targeted treatment options...