Science, Volume 392, Issue 6795, Page 261-261, April 2026.
The life and legacy of George Schaller
Science, Volume 392, Issue 6795, Page 262-262, April 2026.
Calcium-triggered apoplastic ROS bursts balance gravity and mechanical signals for soil navigation
Science, Volume 392, Issue 6795, Page 296-300, April 2026.
Determination of the Solar System contribution to the soft x-ray sky
Science, Volume 392, Issue 6795, Page 285-288, April 2026.
STAT+: HaloMD’s legal win highlights the difficulty of challenging arbitration decisions
Arbitration decisions, it turns out, are like cockroaches. They’re very hard to kill.
It’s a long held truism in the legal world, and it was underscored this week when a federal judge shot down a health insurer’s lawsuit challenging No Surprises Act arbitration decisions. The ruling doesn’t bode well for other pending lawsuits challenging awards doled out under the 2020 law’s arbitration process, known as independent dispute resolution.
“You can’t second guess the arbitrators,” said Chris Deacon, a health policy consultant and former lawyer. “That’s the whole point of arbitration.”
Trump taps former public health leader Erica Schwartz to run CDC
President Trump nominated Erica Schwartz on Thursday to be director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tapping a former public health leader for a position that has been filled mostly on a part-time or interim basis during the second Trump administration.
Schwartz was deputy surgeon general during the first Trump administration and spent much of her career in health roles in the U.S. military.
A pancreatic cancer breakthrough, and new hope for an off-the-shelf CAR-T treatment
On this week’s episode of the Readout LOUD: a pancreatic cancer breakthrough and new hope for an off-the-shelf CAR-T treatment in lymphoma.
Your favorite biotech podcasting crew is back to full strength this week, and we’re bringing you two newsy guest interviews. First, we’ll talk with Allogene Therapeutics Chief Medical Officer Zach Roberts about new study results that bolster the company’s efforts to develop an off-the-shelf CAR-T therapy for B-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.
Brain Gene Variations Help Explain Neurological and Psychiatric Sex Differences
Thousands of genes are expressed differently in the brains of men and women, researchers have discovered.
The findings could help explain differences in neurodevelopmental, psychiatric, and neurodegenerative disorders between the sexes.
While men are more likely to experience schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Parkinson’s disease, women are more prone to mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.
The U.S. study, in Science, is the first systemic single-cell survey of sex differences in gene expression across multiple regions of the human brain.
“Together, these findings provide a comprehensive map of molecular sex differences in the human brain and offer initial insight into their underlying mechanisms and potential functional consequences,” Alex DeCasien, PhD, from the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, told Inside Precision Medicine.
DeCasien and co-workers conducted a high-resolution analysis of gene expression in tissue samples from the brains of 15 men and 15 women using single-nucleus RNA sequencing.
They then used data from earlier large neuroimaging studies to select six cortical regions to sample, four of which showed sex-related differences in grey matter volume and two in which no such differences were found.
The team found subtle but widespread differences in gene activity between men and women. Biological sex explained very little of the variance in gene expression across the brain, at less than 1%, but differences were widespread—with more than 3000 genes showing different expression according to sex in at least one cortical region.
The greatest sex-related differences in gene expression were on the sex chromosomes. However, most of the genes showing sex-related variations in expression were autosomal—carried on one of the 22 numbered non-sex chromosomes.
The predominant driver for sex-biased expression of genes on these autosomal chromosomes were sex steroid hormones such as estrogen and testosterone.
Surprisingly, more than half the X chromosome genes in women were expressed in both alleles for at least one cell type. This indicated that many had escaped X chromosome inactivation—a female phenomenon in which one of the two X chromosomes is switched off early in development to stop women producing double the number of X-linked gene products to men.
“That finding has implications for understanding sex-biased disease susceptibility because several genes implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders reside on the X chromosome,” commented Jessica Tollkuhn, PhD, from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and S Marc Breedlove, from Michigan State University, in an accompanying Perspective article.
They noted that autosomal genes showing sex-biased expression were substantially enriched for extracellular matrix components, hormone signaling pathways, and metabolic processes. “Genes with greater expression in women were enriched for mitochondrial and synaptic functions, whereas male-biased genes were associated with metabolic and structural pathways,” the editorialists added.
“By pinpointing these sexually differentiated processes, the data provide a treasure trove for the discovery of biomarkers of and/or therapeutic targets for differential disease risk in men and women.”
DeCasien and team added: “These findings raise the possibility that sex differences in gene expression modulate the magnitude of genetic effects at risk loci, contributing to differences in disease vulnerability and to reduced portability of polygenic risk prediction across sexes.”
The post Brain Gene Variations Help Explain Neurological and Psychiatric Sex Differences appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
STAT+: Kennedy focuses on affordability, combating fraud in Capitol Hill hearings
WASHINGTON — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. returned to Capitol Hill Thursday, where he defended the administration’s efforts to fight health care fraud and improve affordability — and worked to avoid discussions about vaccine policy.
An hours-long Ways and Means hearing Thursday morning covered a wide range of topics related to Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services and kicked off a marathon series of testimonies about the president’s proposed budget.
Later, during a hearing with the House Appropriations health subcommittee, Kennedy said the president would release the name of the nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before the end of the week. (Soon after, Trump announced the nominee.)
STAT+: Researchers behind GLP-1 obesity drugs advance new approach: Drop GLP-1 as a target
The scientists whose work spurred the development of powerful obesity drugs like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound are now raising a provocative hypothesis: Perhaps targeting the GLP-1 hormone is actually not necessary to achieve effective weight loss.
A group of researchers led by Richard DiMarchi and Matthias Tschöp has created an experimental drug that activates receptors of the GIP and glucagon hormones. They propose — based on rodent and monkey studies — that this kind of molecule, when administered at high enough doses, may result in weight loss comparable to the weight loss seen with drugs that include GLP-1 as a target, and without the tolerability issues like nausea and vomiting that often come with the approved treatments, according to a peer-reviewed draft paper published this week.
The research, funded by a biotech called BlueWater Biosciences, would still need to be confirmed in humans; oftentimes results seen in animals don’t translate in the clinic. But the proposed approach, outlined in the journal Molecular Metabolism by some of the most well-known scientists in the field, is likely to stir controversy, as it challenges a central notion underpinning not just the development of approved obesity products but also next-generation versions.