Volume 29 Issue 9, September 2023

Nature Medicine explores the latest translational and clinical research news, with a newly approved JAK and TEC inhibitor for the autoimmune disease alopecia areata.

Nature Medicine explores the latest translational and clinical research news, with a fast-track designation for a vaccine against sexually transmitted infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

Nigeria’s new mental health act establishes human rights protections for patients and promotes community-based care, offering a roadmap for other countries, despite ongoing challenges.

The US Food and Drug Administration has reduced requirements for preclinical animal testing, leading to a surge of interest in organoids, tissue chips and in silico testing.

Multilevel stakeholder engagement in policy decision-making and implementation-planning is needed to build trust and deliver evidence-based health interventions.

Enhanced informed consent procedures are needed for patients treated with psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA, due to effects that include an altered state of consciousness and vulnerability to suggestion.

Pandemic preparedness plans must include equitable access to diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics, as well as strategies to build trust and combat disinformation.

Scientific and medical publishers have a major role in developing guidelines and policies to combat misinformation and disinformation.

A blood test done in early pregnancy that measures cell-free DNA methylation could represent a novel way to predict the risk of preterm pre-eclampsia.

At a time when global mental health is in crisis, new data support the promotion of hobby engagement at the policy level in all countries.

Using pathology data from Twitter, researchers have built a visual-language model for classifying and retrieving histopathology images — representing a milestone in the development of multifunctional foundational artificial intelligence models in computational pathology.

Our study exposes the determinants of healthy aging in Latin America, underscoring the importance of the effects of social and health disparities compared with traditional factors such as age and sex. Our findings highlight an urgent need for more targeted detection of health risks, interventions and policies, particularly in low-income regions.

By integrating genomic and in vitro functional analysis, this study uncovers tumor-intrinsic mechanisms of resistance to immunotherapies that target B cell maturation antigen (BCMA) or the orphan G-protein-coupled-receptor GPRC5D in multiple myeloma (MM), highlighting a pivotal role for mutations in the genes encoding BCMA and GPRC5D in driving clinical relapse. These insights provide crucial guidance for the selection of therapeutic strategies and the development of next-generation targeted immunotherapies in MM.

This Review summarizes recent advances in biomarkers and therapies for Alzheimer disease—the products of decades of research—and discusses the challenges, gaps and clinical implications.

The current definition of myocardial infarction is applied inconsistently, with implications for patients and research; here, the authors propose a new definition and call for further research and consensus.

In cohorts of 498 pregnant women, methylation profiles from cell-free DNA, in addition to clinical risk factors, improved the early prediction of preeclampsia.

First-in-human results from five cohorts of healthy volunteers and individuals with hepatic steatosis show that RNA interference treatment targeting ANGPTL3 was well tolerated and led to reduction in triglycerides and non-HDL cholesterol.

Analyses of 1,277 human brain proteomes reveal the extent of sex differences in the brain and identify genes associated with neuropsychiatric traits that have differential regulation between males and females.

A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies representing 16 countries found that hobby engagement was associated with better mental and self-reported health in adults aged 65 years and older as well as correlation with higher life expectancy and national happiness levels.

A community-led randomized controlled trial in China showed that a pay-it-forward incentives increased the uptake of hepatitis B and C virus testing in men who have sex with men as compared with standard-of-care.

Machine learning models showed that social disparities, cardiometabolic disease and mental health were the main predictors of aging in Latin American populations, with these factors being more pronounced in low- and middle-income compared to high-income Latin American countries.

In a pivotal phase 2 trial, elranatamab, a bispecific antibody targeting B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) and CD3, had a confirmed objective response rate of 61% in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who had not previously received BCMA-directed therapy.

In a pooled analysis of six international studies involving about 17,900 female survivors of childhood cancer, the use of doxorubicin was associated with a dose-dependent risk of subsequent breast cancer, irrespective of prior chest radiotherapy exposure.

Patients with stage 4 or unresectable stage 3 melanoma refractory to first-line anti-programmed death protein 1 (PD-1) or anti-programmed cell death 1 ligand 1 have longer progression-free survival when treated with a combination of anti-cytotoxic T-lymphocyte protein 4 (CTLA-4) and anti-PD-1 versus anti-CTLA-4 alone.

This is a post hoc 18-month follow-up analysis of the CRB-401 trial, testing idecabtagene vicleucel (ide-cel, bb2121) in relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma, and reports sustained safety and clinical efficacy, which correlates with T cell phenotypes.

Tumor-intrinsic resistance mechanisms, including mutational events and immunoselection of mutant clones, were identified in 30 patients with multiple myeloma who experienced relapse after treatment with anti-BCMA CAR T cells and/or anti-BCMA bispecific T cell engagers (TCEs) or anti-GPRC5D TCE therapy.

Using extracted images and related labels from pathology-related tweets, a model is trained to associate tissue images and text and approaches state-of-the-art performance in clinically relevant tasks, such as tissue classification.

Analysis of monkeypox virus (MPXV) isolates circulating in Nigeria before the 2022 global outbreak of MPXV sheds light on the diversification of the virus that eventually gave rise to the 2022 MPXV lineage.

An Omicron BA.4/BA.5 mRNA booster vaccine elicits high neutralizing responses to the BA.4/BA.5 variant and to ancestral SARS-CoV-2, supporting tailoring booster vaccines to the predominant Omicron variant.

Analysis of antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines encoding variant-specific spike, with or without ancestral spike, suggests no loss of neutralization of the ancestral virus with variant-only vaccines, which may simplify future vaccine updates.

Analysis of data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs showed that 2 years after severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, risk for most postacute sequelae remained elevated in people who were hospitalized with COVID-19 but was attenuated in nonhospitalized individuals.

In a prespecified secondary analysis of the STEP-HFpEF trial, semagludtide treatment was associated with improvements in KCCQ-CSS and body weight, as well as trial secondary endpoints, across the spectrum of obesity classes, with the magnitude of beneficial effects being proportional to the extent of weight loss.

A phase I trial of cerebellar deep brain stimulation to enhance chronic post-stroke motor rehabilitation supports the safety and feasibility of the approach while providing encouraging evidence of motor improvements.