Medical Bulletin 06 January/ 2025

Here are the top medical news for the day

Innovative System to Auto-Detect Infectious Disease Variants Could Revolutionize Outbreak Response

Researchers have come up with a new way to identify more infectious variants of viruses or bacteria that start spreading in humans - including those causing flu, COVID, whooping cough and tuberculosis.

The new approach uses samples from infected humans to allow real-time monitoring of pathogens circulating in human populations, and enable vaccine-evading bugs to be quickly and automatically identified. This could inform the development of vaccines that are more effective in preventing disease.

It can be used for a broad range of viruses and bacteria and only a small number of samples, taken from infected people, are needed to reveal the variants circulating in a population. This makes it particularly valuable for resource-poor settings.

The report is published in the journal Nature.

“Our new method provides a way to show, surprisingly quickly, whether there are new transmissible variants of pathogens circulating in populations - and it can be used for a huge range of bacteria and viruses,” said Dr Noémie Lefrancq, first author of the report, who carried out the work at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics.

The researchers used their new technique to analyse samples of Bordetella pertussis, the bacteria that causes whooping cough.

“The approach will quickly show which variants of a pathogen are most worrying in terms of the potential to make people ill. This means a vaccine can be specifically targeted against these variants, to make it as effective as possible,” said Professor Henrik Salje in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics, senior author of the report.

He added: “If we see a rapid expansion of an antibiotic-resistant variant, then we could change the antibiotic that’s being prescribed to people infected by it, to try and limit the spread of that variant.”

The researchers say this work is an important piece in the larger jigsaw of any public health response to infectious disease.

Ref: Lefrancq, N., Duret, L., Bouchez, V. et al. Learning the fitness dynamics of pathogens from phylogenies. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08309-9

New Study Uncovers Why Cancer Often Spreads to the Lungs

Lung metastases occur in up to 54% of patients with metastatic tumours. Contributing factors to this high frequency include the physical properties of the pulmonary system and a less oxidative environment that may favour the survival of cancer cells.

Moreover, secreted factors from primary tumours alter immune cells and the extracellular matrix of the lung, creating a permissive pre-metastatic environment primed for the arriving cancer cells. Nutrients are also primed during pre-metastatic niche formation.

Yet, whether and how nutrients available in organs in which tumours metastasize confer cancer cells with aggressive traits is mostly undefined.

Hence a recent study found that pulmonary aspartate triggers a cellular signalling cascade in disseminated cancer cells, resulting in a translational programme that boosts aggressiveness of lung metastases. Specifically, the authors observed that patients and mice with breast cancer have high concentrations of aspartate in their lung interstitial fluid. This extracellular aspartate activates the ionotropic N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor in cancer cells, which promotes CREB-dependent expression of deoxyhypusine hydroxylase (DOHH). Deoxyhypusine hydroxylase is essential for hypusination, a post-translational modification that is required for the activity of the non-classical translation initiation factor eIF5A. In turn, a translational programme with TGFβ signalling as a central hub promotes collagen synthesis in lung-disseminated breast cancer cells.

The researchers detected key proteins of this mechanism in lung metastases from patients with breast cancer.

Therefore, they concluded that aspartate, a classical biosynthesis metabolite, functions in the lung environment as an extracellular signalling molecule to promote aggressiveness of metastases.

Ref: Doglioni, G., Fernández-García, J., Igelmann, S. et al. Aspartate signalling drives lung metastasis via alternative translation. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08335-7

Study Finds Multilingualism Enhances Cognitive Skills in Autistic Children

A recent UCLA Health study further supports the cognitive advantages of multilingualism. The research reveals that speaking multiple languages not only boosts overall cognitive functions but also helps manage symptoms and improve daily thought and action regulation in both autistic and non-autistic children.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with marked heterogeneity in executive function (EF) abilities. Executive function components including inhibition and shifting are related to Autism spectrum disorder core symptoms such as perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behavior. Recent research suggests that multilingualism may have a beneficial impact on executive function abilities, especially in children with ASD. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the relationships between multilingualism, executive function, and core symptoms in children with ASD.

Here, the researchers examined these associations in 7–12-year-old children with and without ASD.

The results suggest that multilingual children have stronger parent-reported inhibition, shifting, and perspective-taking skills than monolingual children.

Furthermore, they found a significant interaction between diagnosis and multilingual status on inhibition, such that the effects of multilingualism were stronger for children with ASD than typically developing (TD) children. Finally, indirect effects of multilingualism on perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behaviors mediated by EF skills was also found.

“It turns out that speaking multiple languages, whether or not you have a diagnosis of autism, is associated with better inhibition, better shifting or flexibility, and also better perspective taking ability,” said study lead author Dr. Lucina Uddin, a UCLA Health Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences Professor and Director of the UCLA Brain Connectivity and Cognition Laboratory.

Hence the authors concluded that these results demonstrate the supportive influences multilingual experience might have on bolstering executive function and reducing ASD-related symptoms.

Ref: Romero C, Goodman Z T et al. Multilingualism impacts children's executive function and core autism symptoms; Autism Res, Vol 17(12). https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3260