A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan has provided surprising findings indicating that hospital-onset Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff, infections may come from characteristics associated with the patients themselves and not via hospital transmission. The findings, reported today in Nature Medicine, could help support additional steps needed…

Research conducted by the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, has revealed that the gut microbiome can have a significant impact on the acquisition of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV) infections as well as on the course of the disease. Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, scientists…

U.S. research has shown that the susceptibility of the gut pathogen Clostridioides difficile to antibiotics is affected by other bacteria, suggesting that the entire microbiome should be considered when designing eradication treatments. The presence of other microbes that were more susceptible to low antibiotic concentrations led to increasing numbers of C.…

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) have identified a compound that prevents gastrointestinal infections from multiple strains of Chlostridiodes difficile (C. diff)—including those that can cause serious illness—and are now using the compound to develop drugs that could eventually prevent serious C. diff infections. “C. diff infection…

Non-tuberculous Mycobacterium (NTM) infections, particularly Mycobacterium abscessus, are increasingly common among patients with cystic fibrosis and chronic bronchiectatic lung diseases. Antibiotic resistance poses a challenge to treatment Mycobacterium infections. Now, researchers led by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California San Diego reported 20 new case studies on…

Another piece of the puzzle explaining why some people who contract COVID-19 have milder symptoms than others may have been uncovered by researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The new study, published in Science Immunology, suggests that people with COVID-19 may experience milder symptoms because CD8+ T cells “remember” previous encounters…

Scientists headed by a team at the University of Chicago have shown how genetic differences in the immune system can impact on the types of bacterial communities that colonize the gastrointestinal system. Their studies, in germ-free mice colonized with microbiomes from conventionally reared animals, found that while the makeup of…

North Carolina State University scientists using a mouse model found that antibiotic use creates a veritable “banquet” for Clostridium difficile (C. diff) by altering the native gut bacteria that would normally compete with C. diff for nutrients. The findings (“Shifts in the Gut Metabolome and Clostridium difficile Transcriptome throughout Colonization and Infection in a Mouse Model”), published in…

In a new study lead by scientists at the University of Minnesota and Nantes University Hospital in France, researchers showed that the bacteria in a patient’s gut might predict their risk for life-threatening blood infections following high-dose chemotherapy. Approximately 20,000 cancer patients receive high-dose chemotherapy each year in preparation for…

William A. Haseltine, PhD Hepatitis C is a serious disease that affects more than 58 million people globally.1 Although endemic in many countries, it is possible to eliminate the disease within entire populations. Unfortunately, this has only been done in a limited number of countries. Here…

A little over a decade ago, a paper was published in Science1  that made science fiction a reality. Emmanuel Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, and colleagues reported that they had identified a means of harnessing an element of a bacterial immune system to carry out genome editing in a way that was…

New data from the INSPIRE study that is assessing the long-term symptoms and clinical outcomes of the COVID-19 virus has defined four phenotypes—or distinct symptom presentations—of Long COVID, which adds to the growing body of evidence that it is not a single condition, rather a range of conditions that evolve…

Research led by scientists from Cologne University, Amsterdam UMC and Copenhagen University has shown that a chemo free drug combination therapy can yield better results as well as fewer side effects for young people suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). CLL is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow…

In a boost for the microbiome field, the U.S. FDA has approved Vowst (fecal microbiota spores, live-brpk). It is the first approved orally-administered microbiota-based therapeutic to prevent recurrence of C. difficile infection (CDI). The drug, from Seres Therapeutics and Nestlé Health Science, is expected to be available in June of this year.…

Auransa Inc. and the University of Southern California (USC) are collaborating on a Phase I clinical trial to evaluate AU409, a new kind of treatment for cancers of the liver and solid tumors with liver dominant disease. In preclinical studies, the compound showed anticancer activity against hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). “AU409…