Backed by the combined expertise of three USC schools, scientists are developing a new drug aimed at a previously unexplored biological target in Alzheimer’s disease, aided by an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The team, led by Hussein Yassine of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is investigating why some carriers of the APOE4 gene — the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s — develop dementia while others remain cognitively healthy. His lab has identified an enzyme that predisposes the brain to inflammation and the research team is now working to find a drug that can block it without harmful side effects. Their work points to an enzyme which breaks down protective omega-3 fatty acids in the brain and triggers damaging inflammation.

In a mouse model of liver transplantation, researchers have identified proteins that act as “protective switches” guarding the liver against damage occurring when blood supply is restored during transplantation, a process known as ischemia-reperfusion injury. But they also found the same protective relationship in discarded human livers that we deemed unsuitable for transplantation.

How we focus our attention before we even see an object matters. For example, when we look for something moving in the sky, our expectation would be very different if the object is a bird flying past or a baseball coming straight at us. But it’s unclear whether our brain’s attention focuses first on a broad characteristic of the anticipated object, such as movement, or a specific feature — such as the direction of movement up or down. Researchers from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, addressed this by analyzing electrical brain activity with machine-learning methods. 

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help identify which children with asthma face the highest risk of serious asthma exacerbation and acute respiratory infections. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found the tools can detect those risks as early as age 3.