In a new study, published in Science Advances, researchers at the University of Notre Dame analyzed more than 80 outbreaks of chikungunya virus to improve prediction of future outbreaks and inform vaccine trial development.

“Chikungunya outbreaks are unpredictable in both size and severity,” said Alex Perkins, the Ann and Daniel Monahan Collegiate Professor of infectious disease epidemiology in the Department of Biological Sciences, and co-author of the study. “You can have one outbreak that infects just a few people, and another in a similar setting that infects tens of thousands. That unpredictability is what makes public health planning — and vaccine development — so difficult.”

For the study, Alexander Meyer, a postdoctoral researcher in Perkins’ lab and lead author of the study, and a team of researchers reconstructed and analyzed 86 chikungunya outbreaks, creating the largest comparative dataset of its kind.

“Instead of looking at outbreaks in isolation, looking at many, all of which varied in size and severity, allowed us to search for patterns among them,” Meyer said.

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is one of the most aggressive and hardest forms of breast cancer to treat, but a new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine suggests a surprising way to stop it from spreading. Researchers have discovered that an enzyme called EZH2 drives TNBC cells to divide abnormally, which enables them to relocate to distant organs. The preclinical study also found drugs that block EZH2 could restore order to dividing cells and thwart the spread of TNBC cells.

A research team led by C. Justin LEE and LEE Boyoung at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has identified a new molecular pathway in the brain that directly links abnormal sugar modifications on proteins to depressive behaviors. Specifically, chronic stress disrupts sugar chains (O-glycans) attached to proteins in the prefrontal cortex, thereby triggering depression. The findings, published in Science Advances, open new possibilities for targeted therapies for treatment-resistant depression.