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As presented at the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting: in a randomized controlled phase 3 trial evaluating subcutaneous administration of sasanlimab, an anti-PD-1 inhibitor, with Bacillus Calmette–Guérin induction and maintenance treatment, combination treatment significantly improved event-free survival versus standard-of-care therapy.

A genome-wide association meta-analysis of individuals with clinically assessed or self-reported depression identifies 44 independent risk loci. Comparisons with other psychiatric disorders and candidate gene analyses provide new insights into major depressive disorder.

A genome-wide-association meta-analysis of 18,381 austim spectrum disorder (ASD) cases and 27,969 controls identifies five risk loci. The authors find quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes.

Osteoarthritis is a chronic, heritable disease with no available treatment. Here, the authors show that a validated, rapid-throughput joint phenotyping pipeline detects osteoarthritis in the mouse knee following surgical provocation, in aging and after single gene deletion or point mutation.

Understanding the molecular effects of disease variants in relevant tissues is essential to understanding and treating disease. Here, the authors discover expression and protein quantitative trait loci in cartilage and synovium from 115 osteoarthritis patients to pinpoint genes of action and potential drug treatments.

The lysosomal aspartic protease Cathepsin D (CTSD) is associated with breast cancer progression. Here the authors show that selective inactivation of CTSD in mammary epithelium delays tumor onset due to impaired mTORC1 signaling, but resumes malignant growth due to compensatory oncogenic pathways

Stratified medicine promises to tailor treatment for individual patients, however it remains a major challenge to leverage genetic risk data to aid patient stratification. Here the authors introduce an approach to stratify individuals based on the aggregated impact of their genetic risk factor profiles on tissue-specific gene expression levels, and highlight its ability to identify biologically meaningful and clinically actionable patient subgroups, supporting the notion of different patient ‘biotypes’ characterized by partially distinct disease mechanisms.

A number of costimulatory signals are critical to the activation and regulation of T cells, but how the availability or self-regulation of these occurs was previously unclear. Here the authors show a difference in the fate of ligands trogocytosed by CD28 or CTLA4 and link this to cellular control of costimulation.

Genome-wide meta-analysis of clinically diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and AD-by-proxy (71,880 AD cases, 383,378 controls) identifies new loci and functional pathways that contribute to AD risk.

Shah et al. conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic-related disruptions to cancer healthcare services and reported reduced cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Genome-wide association study for osteoarthritis using data from UK Biobank identifies loci for knee- and hip-specific disease. Functional analyses of chondrocytes provide further insight into candidate causal genes.

Characterizing the essentiality of human genes provides insights into gene function and genome evolution and facilitates the clinical interpretation of genetic variants. This article analyses essentiality metrics based on the statistical intolerance to loss-of-function mutations in human population sequencing studies and discusses commonalities and distinctions relative to data sets from knockout mice and functional genomics screens in human cell culture. Implications for disease genetics and extrapolation to non-coding regions are also discussed.

Integration of GWAS and single-cell transcriptomic data from the entire nervous system systematically identifies cell types underlying brain complex traits and provides insights into the etiology of Parkinson’s disease.

This study uses gene expression predictors for the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other brain regions to perform a transcriptomic imputation analysis of schizophrenia, identifying 413 genic associations across 13 brain regions and 36 significantly enriched pathways.

Sexual dimorphism in genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjögren’s syndrome is linked to differential protein abundance from alleles of complement component 4.

Here the authors show that a large fraction of the tissue-specific methylation pattern is generated postnatally. These changes, which occur in response to hormone signaling, appear to play a major role in the regulation of gene expression and tissue maturation in the liver.

Depression is correlated with many brain-related traits. Here, Shen et al. perform phenome-wide association studies of a depression polygenic risk score (PRS) and find associations with 51 behavioural and 26 neuroimaging traits which are further followed up on using Mendelian randomization and mediation analyses.

Environmental influences during prenatal development may have implications for health and disease later in life. Here, Czamara et al. assess DNA methylation in cord blood from new-born under various models including environmental and genetic effects individually and their additive or interaction effects.

Relatives of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have an unexpectedly high incidence of schizophrenia. Here, the authors show a genetic link between the two conditions, suggesting shared neurobiological mechanisms.

Schizophrenia is a highly heritable genetic disorder, however, identification of specific genetic risk variants has proven difficult because of its complex polygenic nature—a large multi-stage genome-wide association study identifies 128 independent associations in over 100 loci (83 of which are new); key findings include identification of genes involved in glutamergic neurotransmission and support for a link between the immune system and schizophrenia.

Little is known about the biology of back pain, a leading cause of disability. Here the authors report 30 new back pain loci, implicating genes involved in cartilage/bone biology, as well as neurological and inflammatory processes.

Genome-wide meta-analysis of UK Biobank and arcOGEN (77,052 cases and 378,169 controls) identifies 52 new osteoarthritis risk loci. Integrated eQTL colocalization, fine-mapping, and rare-disease data identify putative effector genes for osteoarthritis.

As phase 1 of the Earth Microbiome Project, analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA sequences from more than 27,000 environmental samples delivers a global picture of the basic structure and drivers of microbial distribution.

David Whitcomb, Bernie Devlin and colleagues report the results of a genome-wide association study of pancreatitis. They identify common variants at two loci associated with risk of this disease, including one on the X chromosome that shows strong evidence of interaction with alcohol consumption.

Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas et al. report the largest genome-wide association study to date for developmental dysplasia of the hip using national clinical audit data from the UK. They find a significant association with the GDF5 locus and evidence for shared genetic architecture with hip osteoarthritis.