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A toast to BRD4: How acidity changes the immune response

It started with wine. Or more precisely, a conversation about it. “My colleagues and I were talking about how some people think drinking wine may be anti-inflammatory,” recalls Xu Zhou, Ph.D., from the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at Boston Children’s Hospital. “There’s no scientific ground for that, but we know wine is acidic.”

Around the same time, Zhou and his team were exploring a broader blind spot in immunology: the role of the tissue microenvironment (such as pH, oxygen, and salt concentration) in shaping . While most research had focused on cellular messengers like cytokines, Zhou was curious about how the physical and chemical makeup of tissues might influence , especially in disease.

Inspired by their wine conversation and intrigued by these overlooked components, Zhou’s team launched a study to investigate how acidity affects immune cells. Their findings, published in Cell, show that a drop in pH can suppress immune responses by disrupting a protein called BRD4—an important regulator of gene activity in immune cells. That small chemical shift could have big implications for treating inflammation-related diseases.

Overcoming resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors remains a major objective in cancer

Here, Richard Bucala & team show combined anti-MIF and anti–PD-1 reduces tumor growth and improves survival in melanoma and colorectal cancer mouse models:

The figure shows tumor regions of necrosis, immune infiltration, and reduced tumor volume in mice treated with MIF and PD-1.

1Yale Cancer Center, Department of Internal Medicine, and.

2Section of Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

3Department of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

As brain organoids grow increasingly complex, leading scientists and bioethicists call for global oversight

In an effort to address these ethical grey areas, 17 leading scientists and bioethicists from five countries are urging the establishment of an international oversight body to monitor advances in the rapidly expanding field of human neural organoids and to provide ethical and policy guidance as the science continues to evolve. The call to action, published Thursday in Science, comes as U.S. government agencies are making new investments in organoid science aimed at accelerating drug discovery and reducing reliance on animal models of disease.

In September, the National Institutes of Health announced $87 million in initial contracts to establish a new center dedicated to standardizing organoid research. The move followed an earlier pledge by both the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration to reduce, and possibly replace, testing on mice, primates, and other animals with other methods — including organoids and organ-on-a-chip technologies — for developing certain medicines.

Government promotion of human stem cell models more broadly will only increase the recruitment of new researchers into the field of neural organoids, which has seen an explosion from a few dozen labs a decade ago to hundreds around the world now, said Sergiu Pasca, a pioneering neuroscientist and stem cell biologist at Stanford University who co-authored the Science commentary.

Why Alzheimer’s patients forget loved ones

Few moments are more heartbreaking for families of Alzheimer’s disease patients than when a loved one no longer recognizes them. New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia may reveal why that happens and offer hope for prevention.

UVA’s Harald Sontheimer, graduate student Lata Chaunsali and their colleagues found that when protective structures around break down, people may lose the ability to recognize loved ones. In lab studies, keeping these structures intact helped mice remember one another.

“Finding a structural change that explains a specific memory loss in Alzheimer’s is very exciting,” said Sontheimer, chair of UVA’s Department of Neuroscience and member of the UVA Brain Institute. “It is a completely new target, and we already have suitable drug candidates in hand.”

AI tech can compress LLM chatbot conversation memory by 3–4 times

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Professor Hyun Oh Song from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has developed a new AI technology called KVzip that intelligently compresses the conversation memory of large language model (LLM)-based chatbots used in long-context tasks such as extended dialog and document summarization. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

The term conversation memory refers to the temporary storage of sentences, questions, and responses that a chatbot maintains during interaction, which it uses to generate contextually coherent replies. Using KVzip, a chatbot can compress this memory by eliminating redundant or unnecessary information that is not essential for reconstructing context. The technique allows the chatbot to retain accuracy while reducing memory size and speeding up response generation—a major step forward in efficient, scalable AI dialog systems.

Modern LLM chatbots perform tasks such as dialog, coding, and question answering using enormous contexts that can span hundreds or even thousands of pages. As conversations grow longer, however, the accumulated conversation memory increases computational cost and slows down response time.

Scientists Create First-Ever Drug to Destroy Cancer’s “Immortality” RNA

A research team has unveiled a small molecule that hunts down a cancer-enabling RNA and quietly erases it. Researchers have designed a groundbreaking drug molecule capable of precisely eliminating TERRA, an RNA molecule that some cancer cells rely on to survive. Using a sophisticated method known

Goodbye, Cavities? Scientists Just Found a Way to Regrow Tooth Enamel

A newly developed material has been used to create a gel capable of repairing and rebuilding tooth enamel, offering a potential breakthrough in both preventive and restorative dental care.

Scientists from the University of Nottingham’s School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering designed this bioinspired substance to restore damaged or eroded enamel, reinforce existing enamel, and help guard against future decay. Their findings were published in Nature Communications.

This protein-based gel, which contains no fluoride, can be quickly applied to teeth using the same method dentists use for traditional fluoride treatments. It imitates the natural proteins responsible for guiding enamel formation early in life. Once in place, the gel forms a thin, durable coating that seeps into the tooth surface, filling small cracks and imperfections.

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