A gene called FOXJ1 may drive resistance to taxane chemotherapy during treatment for advanced prostate cancer, according to a new study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The findings provide important new insights into why patients with metastatic disease often stop responding to a key class of life-prolonging chemotherapy drugs after initially benefiting. Given that taxanes remain the only chemotherapy agents with demonstrated survival benefit in advanced prostate cancer, understanding how and why resistance develops is an urgent need for patients.

JMIR Publications, a leading open-access digital health research publisher, and the University of Turku (UTU) are pleased to announce a new Flat-Fee Unlimited Open Access Publishing Agreement.

A research paper by scientists from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine described a framework that leverages bionic, wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor technologies along with multimodal large language models using a coherent temporal modeling effort to address the intertwining of fine-grained temporal dependencies, heterogeneous biomedical modalities, and interpretable risk stratification.

The new research paper, published on Mar. 02 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, unveiled a first-of-its-kind intelligent cardiovascular monitoring framework that merges bionic wearable ECG technology with multimodal large language models, achieving unprecedented accuracy in early myocardial ischemia detection and post-reperfusion risk stratification.

A research paper by scientists from East China University of Science and Technology, University of Applied Sciences Campus Vienna, and other institutions proposed a domain generalization model (DGIFE) for electroencephalography (EEG) signals, featuring structured feature decoupling and fine-grained data augmentation to address the domain bias challenge in cross-subject brain-computer interface (BCI) applications.

The new research paper, published on Feb. 24 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, presented the development, validation, and optimization of the DGIFE model, demonstrating its superior generalization performance and noise robustness across multiple public datasets, providing an effective solution for practical BCI deployment.

Predicting major-histocompatibility complex class II (MHC-II) restricted epitopes is challenging; however, AlphaFold (AF) may provide a structure-based pan-prediction solution. In this study, we have established the new tool AlphaFold-prediction (AF-pred) with a clear standard for quantitative prediction results of MHC-II-restricted epitopes. We validated AF-pred using MHC-II molecules from humans, pigs, cattle, and bats, with this validation including large-scale in silico analyses with known immunopeptidome datasets, as well as in vitro binding assays and crystallographic characterization of newly predicted epitopes. When compared to sequence-based tools heavily trained with the human immunopeptidome, AF-pred demonstrates advantages in the prediction of cross-species MHC-II binding patterns. Using unreported bat MHC-II structures, we analyzed the prediction capability, logic, and limitations of AF-pred. In addition, we explored the impact of the AF algorithm iterations on the prediction of MHC-II-restricted epitopes. These results demonstrate that AF-pred is capable of cross-species prediction of MHC-II-restricted epitopes, which is conducive to the development of novel T-cell epitope vaccines and the advancement of the "One Health" initiative.

Radiation-induced lung injury (RILI) is a common complication of radiotherapy. Berberine, a natural compound used in traditional Chinese medicine, has been associated with reduced RILI incidence, but its mechanism remains unclear. In a mouse model of thoracic irradiation, researchers found that berberine reshaped the gut microbiota and increased beneficial microbial metabolites, which were linked to reduced lung inflammation and tissue injury. The findings highlight the gut–lung axis as an important regulator of radiation responses and suggest new opportunities to improve the safety of radiotherapy.