The newly launched South African Blood Regulatory (SABR) dataset reveals how genetic variation influences blood traits and gene activity in African populations, providing crucial insights into diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

This means researchers can now use the resource to better predict who is at risk, why specific populations respond differently to treatments, and how to develop more effective, tailored interventions.

With African populations historically underrepresented in genomic research, SABR marks a significant step toward more inclusive and more accurate precision medicine.

For the first time in the world, a Korean research team discovered how cellular aging can spread systemically through the bloodstream—offering new insights and a potential therapeutic strategy to combat aging-related decline.

Professor Ok Hee Jeon's research group at the Department of Convergence Medicine, Korea University's College of Medicine, discovered that High Mobility Group Box 1 (HMGB1),a key extracellular senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factor, plays a critical role in transmitting senescence from aging cells to distant tissues.

Ovarian cancer (OC) remains the deadliest gynecologic malignancy, with platinum-based chemotherapies such as carboplatin serving as the standard first-line treatment. However, the emergence of carboplatin resistance presents a major therapeutic challenge, and the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. In this study, Dr. Tao Lu’s group from Indiana University School of Medicine, employed a novel validation-based insertional mutagenesis (VBIM) technique to identify genes that confer resistance to carboplatin in human epithelial OC cells. This screen revealed hematological and neurological expressed 1-like (HN1L/JPT2) as a previously unrecognized contributor to drug resistance. HN1L overexpression enhanced resistance to carboplatin, whereas shRNA-mediated knockdown sensitized OC cells to treatment. Mechanistically, HN1L promoted resistance by activating nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) signaling. In addition, HN1L depletion reduced anchorage-independent growth in vitro and impaired tumorigenicity in a xenograft model of OC. Immunohistochemical (IHC) analysis demonstrated elevated HN1L expression in both OC cell lines and patient tissues across multiple disease stages. These findings identify HN1L as a novel carboplatin resistance gene and suggest that targeting HN1L may represent a promising strategy for overcoming platinum resistance in OC.