Ludwig Cancer Research study uncovers novel aspect of tumor evolution and potential targets for therapy

 Ping-Chih Ho, Ludwig Lausanne Associate Member
Photo Credit: Ludwig Cancer Research

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has discovered that the immune system’s surveillance of cancer can itself induce metabolic adaptations in the cells of early-stage tumors that simultaneously promote their growth and equip them to suppress lethal immune responses.

Led by Ludwig Lausanne Associate Member Ping-Chih Ho and published in Cell Metabolism, the study details the precise mechanism by which this “immunometabolic editing” of emergent tumors occurs in mouse models of the skin cancer melanoma and identifies a novel biochemical signaling cascade and proteins that orchestrate its effects. Aside from illuminating a previously unknown dimension of tumor evolution, the findings hold significant promise for improving the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy.

“We have uncovered dozens of metabolic enzymes that contribute to immune evasion in melanoma tumors,” said Ho. “These enzymes, as well as some of the individual components of the signaling pathway we’ve identified, represent a rich trove of potential drug targets to undermine the defenses erected by immunometabolic editing. Such drugs could make tumors vulnerable to immune clearance and could also be used in combination with checkpoint blockade and other immunotherapies to overcome the resistance most cancers have to such treatments.”

Developing antibiotics that target multiple-drug-resistant bacteria

The sphaerimicin analogs (SPMs) inhibit the activity of MraY, and hence the replication of bacteria, with different degrees of effectiveness. The potency of the analog increases as the IC50 decrease Illustration Credit: Takeshi Nakaya, et al. Nature Communications. December 20, 2022

Researchers have designed and synthesized analogs of a new antibiotic that is effective against multidrug-resistant bacteria, opening a new front in the fight against these infections.

Antibiotics are vital drugs in the treatment of a number of bacterial diseases. However, due to continuing overuse and misuse, the number of bacteria strains that are resistant to multiple antibiotics is increasing, affecting millions of people worldwide. The development of new antibacterial compounds that target multiple drug resistant bacteria is also an active field of research so that this growing issue can be controlled.

A team led by Professor Satoshi Ichikawa at Hokkaido University has been working on the development of new antibacterial. Their most recent research, published in the journal Nature Communications, details the development of a highly effective antibacterial compound that is effective against the most common multidrug-resistant bacteria.

Studies find Omicron related hospitalizations lower in severity than Delta and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine remains effective in preventing hospitalizations

Photo Credit: Fernando Zhiminaicela

Adult hospitalizations from Omicron-related SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) were less severe than Delta and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (also known as Comirnaty and BNT162b2*) remains effective in preventing not only hospitalization, but severe patient outcomes associated with COVID-19, two new research studies have found.

The University of Bristol-led research, funded and conducted in collaboration with Pfizer Inc., as part of AvonCAP, is published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.

AvonCAP records adults who are admitted to Bristol’s two hospital Trusts – North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW) with possible respiratory infection.

In the first paper ‘Severity of Omicron (B.1.1.529) and Delta (B.1.617.2) SARS-CoV-2 infection among hospitalized adults: a prospective cohort study in Bristol, United Kingdom’ researchers assessed whether Delta SARS-CoV-2 infection resulted in worse patient outcomes than Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infection, in hospitalized patients

The study aimed to provide more detailed data on patient outcomes, such as the need for respiratory support.

Scientists Have Created New Substance to Treat Neurological Disorders

Scientists used a set of 1,2,3-triazole derivatives and modeled the structure of the putative inhibitor.
 Photo Credit: Andrey Fomin

The international team of scientists, including chemists from the Ural Federal University, has developed a substance that may become the basis for drugs that suppress or alleviate a number of neurological disorders. These include, for example, psychosis, schizophrenia, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, etc. The scientists reported the development and first results of the study in the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics. The study was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Project No. 075-15-2020-777).

"We found that the enzyme Phosphodiesterase 10A, which is produced in the body, is directly linked to neurological disorders. If you inhibit this enzyme, you can significantly slow down or even suppress the disease. For this purpose, we used a set of derivatives of 1,2,3-triazole, a pharmacophore whose fragments are contained in many drugs, and modeled the structure of the putative TP-10 inhibitor. We hypothesize that it would have a positive effect on conditions associated with brain dysfunction by reducing the activity of the Phosphodiesterase 10A enzyme. Other inhibitors developed by foreign companies still have no reliable antipsychotic efficacy so far," notes Dhananjay Bhattacherjee, senior researcher at the Department of Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry at UrFU.

Scientists invent pioneering technique to construct rare molecules

Bahamaolide A is a polyketide natural product with potent antifungal activity, which was isolated from bacteria cultured from a sediment sample collected at North Cat Cay in the Bahamas and has now been synthesized in the chemical laboratory for the first time.
Image Credit: University of Bristol and Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have created a much faster way to make certain complex molecules, which are widely used by pharmaceuticals for antibiotics and anti-fungal medicines.

The first-of-its-kind discovery by chemists at the University of Bristol has the potential to speed up the production of such drugs, making them cheaper and more accessible.

The breakthrough, published in Nature Chemistry, marks the culmination of a five-year research project which has finally cracked how to reconstruct in a laboratory a particularly complex molecule, from the family of molecules known as polyketides.

Lead author Sheenagh Aiken, a PhD student at the university’s School of Chemistry when the work was completed, said: “It’s an exciting discovery, which could bring important benefits for the pharmaceutical industry and public health.

Experimental COVID-19 Vaccine Offers Long-Term Protection Against Severe Disease

A study involving rhesus macaques at the California National Primate Research Center shows that COVID-19 vaccines given to infant animals protect against lung disease one year after vaccination.
 Photo Credit: CNPRC

Two-dose vaccines provide protection against lung disease in rhesus macaques one year after they were vaccinated as infants, a new study shows. The work, published in Science Translational Medicine Dec. 1, is a follow-up to a 2021 studying showing that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate containing an adjuvant, a substance that enhances immune responses, elicited durable neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 during infancy in preclinical research.

The co-senior authors of the paper are Kristina De Paris, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Sallie Permar, professor and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine; and Koen K.A. Van Rompay, leader of the Infectious Disease Unit at the California National Primate Research at the University of California, Davis. Co-first authors are Emma C. Milligan at the Children’s Research Institute, UNC School of Medicine; and Katherine Olstad at the CNPRC.

To evaluate SARS-CoV-2 infant vaccination, the researchers immunized two groups of eight infant rhesus macaques at the CNPRC at 2 months of age and again four weeks later. Each animal received one of two vaccine types: a preclinical version of the Moderna mRNA vaccine or a vaccine combining a protein developed by the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with a potent adjuvant formulation. Consisting of 3M’s molecular adjuvant 3M-052 formulated in a squalene emulsion by the Access to Advanced Health Institute (AAHI), the adjuvant formulation stimulates immune responses by engaging receptors on immune cells.

Blood thinning drug to treat recovery from severe COVID-19 is not effective

The HEAL-COVID trial (Helping to Alleviate the Longer-term consequences of COVID-19) is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. To date, more than a thousand NHS patients hospitalized with COVID have taken part in HEAL-COVID, a platform trial that is aiming to find treatments to reduce the number who die or are readmitted following their time in hospital.

In these first results from HEAL-COVID, it’s been shown that prescribing the oral anticoagulant Apixaban does not stop COVID patients from later dying or being readmitted to hospital over the following year (Apixaban 29.1%, versus standard care 30.8%).

As well as not being beneficial, anticoagulant therapy has known serious side effects, and these were experienced by participants in the trial with a small number of the 402 participants receiving Apixaban having major bleeding that required them to discontinue the treatment.

There was also no benefit from Apixaban in terms of the number of days alive and out of hospital at day 60 after randomization (Apixaban 59 days, versus standard care 59 days).

Following these results, the trial will continue to test another drug called Atorvastatin, a widely used lipid lowering drug (‘a statin’) that acts on other mechanisms of disease that are thought to be important in COVID.

Positive media coverage of cannabis studies regardless of therapeutic effect

Photo Credit: Julia Teichmann

In cannabis trials against pain, people who take placebos report feeling largely the same level of pain relief as those who consume the active cannabinoid substance. Still, these studies receive significant media coverage regardless of the clinical outcome, report researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden in a study published in JAMA Network Open.

“We see that cannabis studies are often described in positive terms in the media regardless of their results,” says the study’s first author Filip Gedin, postdoc researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “This is problematic and can influence expectations when it comes to the effects of cannabis therapy on pain. The greater the benefit a treatment is assumed to have, the more potential harms can be tolerated.”

The study is based on an analysis of published clinical studies in which cannabis has been compared with placebo for the treatment of clinical pain. The change in pain intensity before and after treatment were the study’s primary outcome measurement.

The analysis drew on 20 studies published up to September 2021 involving almost 1,500 individuals.

Protein Spheres Protect the Genome of Cancer Cells

MYC proteins are colored green in this figure. In normally growing cells, they are homogeneously distributed in the cell nucleus (left). In diverse stress situations, as they occur in cancer cells, they rearrange themselves, form sphere-like structures and thus surround particularly vulnerable sections of the genome.
Image Credit: Team Martin Eilers / Universität Würzburg

Hollow spheres made of MYC proteins open new doors in cancer research. Würzburg scientists have discovered them and report about this breakthrough in the journal "Nature".

MYC genes and their proteins play a central role in the emergence and development of almost all cancers. They drive uncontrolled growth and altered metabolism of tumor cells. And they help tumors hide from the immune system.

MYC proteins also show an activity that was previously unknown – and which is now opening new doors for cancer research: They form hollow spheres that protect particularly sensitive parts of the genome. If these MYC spheres are destroyed, cancer cells will die.

This was reported by a research team led by Martin Eilers and Elmar Wolf from the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU, Bavaria, Germany) in the journal Nature. The researchers are convinced that their discovery is a game changer for cancer research, an important breakthrough on the way to new therapeutic strategies.

Major discovery about mammalian brains surprises researchers

Illustration shows vacuolar-type adenosine triphosphatases (V-ATPases, large blue structures) on a synaptic vesicle from a nerve cell in the mammalian brain.
Illustration Image: C. Kutzner, H. Grubmüller and R. Jahn/Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Major discovery about mammalian brains surprises researchers, University of Copenhagen researchers have made an incredible discovery. Namely, a vital enzyme that enables brain signals is switching on/off at random, even taking hours-long “breaks from work”. These findings may have a major impact on our understanding of the brain and the development of pharmaceuticals. 

Millions of neurons are constantly messaging each other to shape thoughts and memories and let us move our bodies at will. When two neurons meet to exchange a message, neurotransmitters are transported from one neuron to another with the aid of a unique enzyme.

This process is crucial for neuronal communication and the survival of all complex organisms. Until now, researchers worldwide thought that these enzymes were active at all times to convey essential signals continuously. But this is far from the case.

Using a groundbreaking method, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Chemistry have closely studied the enzyme and discovered that its activity is switching on and off at random intervals, which contradicts our previous understanding.

Covid-19: the Spike protein is no longer the only target

Possible mechanism of action of a drug targeting Nsp1 of SARS-CoV-2. In infected cells, Nsp1 blocks the ribosome mRNA canal by acting as a "cap" that prevents the expression of the host's mRNA. Linking a ligand to the proposed cryptic pocket highlighted in purple could prevent blockage mediated by Nsp1 and, ultimately, restore the ability of the ribosome to initiate the translation of the mRNA.
Photo Credit: UNIGE Alberto Borsatto

A research team led by the UNIGE reveals a hidden cavity on a key SARS-CoV-2 protein to which drugs could bind.

With the continuous emergence of new variants and the risk of new strains of the virus, the development of innovative therapies against SARS-CoV-2 remains a major public health challenge. Currently, the proteins that are on the surface of the virus and/or are involved in its replication are the preferred therapeutic targets, like the Spike protein targeted by vaccines. One of them, the non-structural protein Nsp1, had been studied little until now. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with University College London (UCL) and the University of Barcelona, has now revealed the existence of a hidden ''pocket’ on its surface. A potential drug target, this cavity opens the way to the development of new treatments against Covid-19 and other coronaviruses. These results can be found in the journal eLife.

Probiotic ‘backpacks’ show promise for treating inflammatory bowel diseases

Probiotic bacteria (teal) coated in a layer of biomaterial as they travel through a human intestine. Attached to the bacteria are reactive oxygen species nano-scavengers.
Image Credit: Quanyin Hu

Like elite firefighters headed into the wilderness to combat an uncontrolled blaze, probiotic bacteria do a better job quelling gut inflammation when they’re equipped with the best gear.

A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison demonstrates just how much promise some well-equipped gut-friendly bacteria hold for improving treatments of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Led by Quanyin Hu, a biomedical engineer and professor in the UW–Madison School of Pharmacy, the research builds on technology the team had previously designed. That prior technology encases beneficial bacteria within a very thin protective shell to help them survive an onslaught of stomach acids and competing microbes long enough to establish and multiply in the guts of mice.

While the technology makes orally administered probiotics more effective, IBD is a complex disease that usually involves more than gut microbial communities that are out of whack.

“IBD is a complicated disease, and you need to attack it at different angles,” says Hu.

So, Hu and his colleagues devised specialized nanoparticles to neutralize molecules implicated in IBD. They’ve also figured out a way of attaching these nanoparticle “backpacks” to beneficial bacteria after encasing them in the protective coating.

Injections for diabetes, cancer could become unnecessary

Young woman injecting insulin
Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk

Researchers at UC Riverside are paving the way for diabetes and cancer patients to forget needles and injections, and instead take pills to manage their conditions.

Some drugs for these diseases dissolve in water, so transporting them through the intestines, which receive what we drink and eat, is not feasible. As a result, these drugs cannot be administered by mouth. However, UCR scientists have created a chemical “tag” that can be added to these drugs, allowing them to enter blood circulation via the intestines.

The details of how they found the tag, and demonstrations of its effectiveness, are described in a new Journal of the American Chemical Society paper.

The tag is composed of a small peptide, which is like a protein fragment. “Because they are relatively small molecules, you can chemically attach them to drugs, or other molecules of interest, and use them to deliver those drugs orally,” said Min Xue, UCR chemistry professor who led the research.

Xue’s laboratory was testing something unrelated when the researchers observed these peptides making their way into cells.

Efficient mRNA delivery by branched lipids

A cross-section of an LNP-RNA. The mRNA (red) is encapsulated by lipids (blue spheres with tails.
 Image Credit: Yusuke Sato

A novel branched lipid that has a high stability in storage and a high efficiency in the delivery of mRNA to cells has been developed.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) are biological molecules that transfer the information coded by genes in the nucleus to the cytoplasm for protein synthesis by ribosomes. mRNA sequences can be designed to encode specific proteins; the most well-known example of this are the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. mRNA molecules are large and chemically unstable, so a vector must be utilized to deliver mRNA to the cells. One of the most advanced technologies for the delivery of mRNA are lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are composed of ionizable lipids, cholesterol, helper lipids and polyethylene glycol.

A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Yusuke Sato and Professor Hideyoshi Harashima at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hokkaido University, and by Kazuki Hashiba at the Nitto Denko Corporation have developed a novel branched ionizable lipid which, when included in LNPs, greatly increases the efficiency of mRNA delivery. Their results were published in the journal Small Science.

How Pathogens Hijack Immune System to Cause Vaccine-Enhanced Disease

Associate Professor Steven Szczepanek (standing, left) with graduate students Tyler Gavitt (seated) and Arlind Mara (standing, right).
Photo Credit: Jason Sheldon/UConn

Researchers in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources are working to unlock a decades-long mystery that has hampered development of a walking pneumonia vaccine.

Associate Professor Steven Szczepanek and Professor Steven Geary from the Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science, along with former graduate students Tyler Gavitt and Arland Mara, published findings that help explain how Mycoplasma pneumoniae (Mp) hijacks our immune system following vaccination.

They shared their findings in two recent publications in Nature journal npj Vaccines.

Mp is a common pathogen that causes walking pneumonia. While this respiratory infection is not typically severe, it is a common co-pathogen with illnesses that spread in the same way, like the flu or COVID-19, which can cause more severe illnesses, especially in older or immunocompromised adults.

In the 1960s, scientists began working to develop an Mp vaccine. They killed the bacteria and injected it into human subjects, thinking it would provide protection from actual infection. But that’s not what happened.

A new nanoparticle to act at the heart of cells

This electron micrograph documents the porous nature of silica nanoparticles. These pores are large enough to allow entrance of a large number of NSA molecules. Here, they are protected until being taken up by the immune cells. At this point NSA is released and can stop the inflammatory processes.
Credit: UNIGE - Carole Bourquin

How can a drug be delivered exactly where it is needed, while limiting the risk of side effects? The use of nanoparticles to encapsulate a drug to protect it and the body until it reaches its point of action is being increasingly studied. However, this requires identifying the right nanoparticle for each drug according to a series of precise parameters. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München (LMU) has succeeded in developing a fully biodegradable nanoparticle capable of delivering a new anti-inflammatory drug directly into macrophages - the cells where uncontrolled inflammatory reactions are triggered - ensuring its effectiveness. In addition, the scientists used an invitro screening methodology, thus limiting the need for animal testing. These results, recently published in the Journal of Controlled Release, open the way to an extremely powerful and targeted anti-inflammatory treatment.

Inflammation is an essential physiological response of the body to defend itself against pathogens such as bacteria. It can, however, become problematic when it turns into a chronic condition, such as in cancers, autoimmune diseases or certain viral infections. Many treatments already exist, but their action is often not very targeted, high doses are required and deleterious side effects are frequent. Macrophages, large immune cells whose natural function is to absorb pathogens and trigger inflammation to destroy them, are often involved in inflammatory diseases. When overactivated, they trigger an excessive inflammatory response that turns against the body instead of protecting it.

New experimental treatment can stop the growth of schwannoma tumors

Researchers showed that after just 21 days of the drugs being administered, tumor growth can be strongly and significantly reduced.
Photo Credit: MART PRODUCTION

Two novel and orally administered drugs can not only block the growth, but also shrink the size, of a tumor type found in the nervous system, new research has shown.

The tumors, schwannomas, most frequently grow on the nerves that bring hearing and balance information into the brain. Schwannomas are the most common nerve sheath tumor, and can occur in anyone but are also linked to a hereditary condition known as Neurofibromatosis Type II (NF2).

In NF2, where the function of the protein Merlin is lost in cells, patients frequently develop not only schwannomas, but also meningioma tumors associated with the brain and spinal cord.

The treatment of both tumor types is difficult, with surgery being the current mainstay but also carrying a high risk of damage to the surrounding normal nervous system tissue.

With an urgent need for new treatments, an international team of scientists focused on the Hippo signaling pathway, which normally controls organ size in human tissues and cells, but is dysregulated in multiple types of cancer.

Therapeutic HIV vaccine with Oxford technology achieves encouraging results

Artist illustration of the HIV virus.
Illustration Credit: Darwin Laganzon

A phase I/IIa clinical trial that the University of Oxford collaborated on has demonstrated that a T-cell therapeutic HIV vaccine was associated with better control of the virus rebound when antiretroviral therapy (ART) was temporarily withdrawn.

Researchers carrying out the AELIX-002 study, whose results have been published in Nature Medicine, reported that two fifths of participants without any genetic background associated with spontaneous HIV control were able to stay off ART for the six-month duration of the supervised ART pause.

The vaccine in the study – developed by AELIX Therapeutics – delivered the HIVACAT T-cell Immunogen (HTI) using a combination of DNA vector, modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) vector and simian adenovirus vector ChAdOx1. The latter two vaccines were constructed at Oxford.

Tomáš Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, who leads on HIV vaccine development, said:

‘This result provides further encouragement that active immunization against HIV may be possible, slowing HIV replication, providing a window of treatment holidays for people living with HIV and eventually leading to HIV cure. T cells/T-cell vaccines are likely to play an important part in the final package for HIV cure and, perhaps, other advanced therapies for difficult diseases.’

A new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria

This inoculated MacConkey agar culture plate cultivated colonial growth of Gram-negative, small rod-shaped and facultatively anaerobic Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria. K. pneumoniae bacteria are commonly found in the human gastrointestinal tract, and are often the cause of hospital acquired, or nosocomial infections involving the urinary and pulmonary systems.
Credit: CDC

The unreasonable use of antibiotics has pushed bacteria to develop resistance mechanisms to this type of treatment. This phenomenon, known as antibiotic resistance, is now considered by the WHO as one of the greatest threats to health. The lack of treatment against multi-resistant bacteria could bring us back to a time when millions of people died of pneumonia or salmonella. The bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is very common in hospitals and particularly virulent, is one of the pathogens against which our weapons are becoming blunt. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has discovered that edoxudine, an anti-herpes molecule discovered in the 60s, weakens the protective surface of Klebsiella bacteria and makes them easier to eliminate for immune cells. These results can be read in the journal PLOS One.

Klebsiella pneumoniae causes many respiratory, intestinal and urinary tract infections. Due to its resistance to most common antibiotics and its high virulence, some of its strains can be fatal for 40% to 50% of infected people. There is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic molecules to counter it. “Since the 1930s, medicine has relied on antibiotics to get rid of pathogenic bacteria,” explains Pierre Cosson, professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led this research. “But other approaches are possible, among which trying to weaken the bacteria’s defense system so that they can no longer escape the immune system. This avenue seems all the more promising as the virulence of Klebsiella pneumoniae stems largely from its ability to evade attacks from immune cells.”

Bulking Up to Beat Bacteria

The inhibitor-binding site of the wild-type MexB pump. (a) The crystal structure of the inhibitor ABI-PP bound to the MexB trimer. Three MexB monomers are shown in green, blue, and red, representing the access, binding, and extrusion monomer, respectively. ABI-PP is shown as a yellow space-filling model. (b) A close-up view of the inhibitor binding site. The substrate translocation pathway is shown as a solid gray surface. The proximal and distal binding pockets are indicated in green and blue circles, respectively. The inhibitor binding pit is shown as a red surface. The ABI-PP molecule is represented as a yellow stick model. (c) A detailed view of the inhibitor-binding site. Carbon atoms of ABI-PP are indicated in yellow while amino acid residues are indicated in green. The classification of these amino acids is shown on the right side of the panel.
Image Credit: 2022 Yamasaki et al., Spatial Characteristics of the Efflux Pump MexB Determine Inhibitor Binding, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy

The medical profession is in the midst of losing an arms race. Bacterial antibiotic resistance doesn’t just threaten our ability to treat infection but our ability to carry out any treatment where infection is a risk. This includes a raft of life-saving surgeries ranging from coronary bypass operations to organ transplantation. In fact, the number of new antimicrobials being developed is declining each year. Understanding how bacteria resist the influence of antibiotics is essential to winning this arms race: it is time to make up ground.

In a study published this month in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, researchers at Osaka University have produced new insights into the structure of a particular bacterial protein known as an efflux pump. This protein is involved in antibiotic resistance and its structure influences the ability of drugs to target it.