Nature Methods
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Preprints posted in the last 7 days, ranked by how well they match Nature Methods's content profile, based on 336 papers previously published here. The average preprint has a 0.39% match score for this journal, so anything above that is already an above-average fit.
Zhang, C.; Chen, Y.-L.; Jamilov, A.; Liu, E.; Shree, S.; Lam, B. D.; Foy, B. H.
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Most routine clinical markers are interpreted using population-based reference intervals, despite being regulated around patient-specific homeostatic setpoints. This mismatch obscures physiologic shifts, inhibiting detection of early disease signatures. Here, we develop a novel Bayesian inference method that adaptively constructs personalized reference intervals using each patients existing health records. In analysis of >100 million lab tests in >800,000 patients, these personalized intervals can be accurately constructed with only minimal prior data, meaning this method can be applied near universally. We show that across 43 common lab markers, patient setpoints are strongly associated with future morbidity, with signal strength increasing as more test data is collected. Deviation from personalized reference intervals provides strong and novel risk signatures across diverse disease states, including hypothyroidism, hematologic cancers, kidney disease, and pregnancy complications. Importantly, personalized reference intervals capture a different risk signature to existing population-based approaches, with the highest risk patients being those who deviate from both intervals simultaneously. In a targeted clinical use case study of iron infusion, use of personalized reference intervals greatly improved prediction of treatment efficacy and allowed precise tracking of treatment responses. Our results illustrate how existing health records can be used to construct personalized benchmarks for nearly all common clinical tests, driving a new paradigm for precision laboratory medicine.
Yang, K.; Shi, P.; Huang, H.; Musio, F.; Baazaoui, H.; Aydin, O. U.; Hilbert, A.; Hamadache, R. E.; Yalcin, C.; Zhang, M.; Falcetta, D.; de la Rosa, E.; Shit, S.; Prabhakar, C.; Wittmann, B.; Rokuss, M. R.; Kirchhoff, Y.; Al-Maskari, R.; Hoeher, L.; Juchler, N.; Casamitjana, A.; Cleary, J.; Schmick, A.; Baumgartner, P.; Deseoe, J.; Vandans, O.; Lee, D.; Oh, K.; LaBella, D.; Mazher, M.; Niederer, S. A.; Qayyum, A.; Liu, Y.; Chen, J.; Kim, W.; Asawalertsak, N.; Kim, M.; Shin, D.; Park, S.-H.; Kikuchi, S.; Zhang, Y.; Liu, J.; Cui, Y.; Qiu, Y.; Verschuur, A.; Zhang, J.; van der Schaaf, I.; Su, R.;
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We present the TopBrain 2025 Challenge, the first benchmark for fine-grained multiclass segmentation of the whole brain vasculature in both computed tomography angiography (CTA) and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). Building on the TopCoW challenge, TopBrain scales vessel annotation from the Circle of Willis to the entire brain, introducing a dataset of 90 annotated volumes across 48 landmark vessel classes spanning arterial and venous systems, of which 50 training volumes are publicly released. Vessel definitions were consolidated from established neuroanatomical references into a unified annotation scheme, and vessel caliber measurements along the centerline are reported for the first time across the whole brain vascular anatomy. To address the unique challenges of multiclass brain vessel segmentation, we propose an evaluation framework that accounts for detection in segmentation performance, assesses anatomical plausibility, and introduces novel contamination metrics that characterize inter-class prediction errors. Fifteen teams from over 220 registered participants submitted algorithms to the benchmark. The top-performing teams built on nnUNet with principled system design choices, achieving around 80% Dice scores, near-zero invalid neighbor counts, over 60% F1 scores for side-road vessels, and below 18% foreground contamination ratio. Larger vessels are easier to segment, while smaller and more complex vessels remain the true bottleneck. The annotated datasets and podium-finish algorithms are made publicly available on Zenodo.
Napier, A.; Wiley, J.; Heslin, M.
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A closed-loop quality system deployed across thirteen US hospital sites resolved physician complaints with zero regressions on 42 tracked cases across 1,089 optimization iterations, while a deterministic assembly-agent replacement cut H+P trace latency from 19.6 s to 10.8 s (-8.8 s, 95% CI [-10.5, -7.1] s; n = 100 pre, n = 100 post). We report four observations and an architectural follow-through. First, the same binary-check instrument produces opposite outcomes depending on the question asked: "maximize this score" produces structurally-correct notes that physicians reject (Spearman rho = -0.077, 95% CI [-0.40, 0.26], n = 36); "did this specific fabrication stop?" produces rater-invariant deployment decisions. Second, in our pipeline, assembly-stage agents did not respond to prompt optimization the way reasoning agents did: four consecutive optimization attempts produced 18-28 point regressions. Third, physician preference is rater-fragile at typical clinical-AI calibration sample sizes (Cohen's kappa = 0.028 between two board-certified physicians, 95% CI [-0.30, 0.36] on n = 35 overlapping pairs). Fourth, the architectural punchline: six weeks after the prediction, the LLM call at the chart-assembly step was replaced with a deterministic renderer (sub-500-character template plus sandboxed scripting), lifting the defect-free rate on a 51-case holdout from 49% to 84%. We introduce a Pareto-with-absolute-floors acceptance rule (multi-axis commit with severity-class categorical vetoes) as a methodological contribution distinct from scalar-reward acceptance in standard prompt-optimization frameworks. Cross-iteration rejection memory prevents the loop from re-proposing edits already rejected three or more times. A reproducibility bundle (anonymized ablation per-case counts, bootstrap-CI data, analysis scripts) is released under CC BY 4.0 at github.com/sayvant/SQS-Auditor-paper-data.
Hu, S.; Cheng, H.; Gillenwater, L.; Manpearl, K.; Mandava, A.; Wang, Y.; Pividori, M.; Stranger, B.; Krishnan, A.; Greene, C.; Gao, Y.
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Objective. Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) such as PrimeKG, Hetionet, UMLS, and PharmGKB are increasingly used as the substrate for downstream machine-learning, retrieval-augmented generation, drug-repurposing, and electronic health record (EHR) augmentation pipelines. The dominant assumption in published work is that integrating two or more such KGs is a tractable engineering step solved by identifier (ID) matching. This paper interrogates that assumption empirically. We quantify how much concept overlap survives realistic alignment, and we characterize the new failure modes introduced by the methods that practitioners reach for when ID matching is insufficient. Materials and Methods. We compared four widely used biomedical KGs (PrimeKG, Hetionet v1.0, the full UMLS Metathesaurus, and PharmGKB) across eleven node types using a tiered alignment pipeline: (1) direct ID matching for nodes sharing a primary vocabulary; (2) cross-ontology bridging using standard mappings (e.g., MONDO-DOID, HPO-UMLS, HPO-UMLS-MeSH for side effects, NCBI Gene-HGNC-UMLS, UBERON-FMA/SNOMEDCT_US/NCI/MeSH for anatomy); (3) ClinicalBERT cosine-similarity grouping at threshold >= 0.98 for over-segmented disease nodes, with a deterministic suffix-stripping canonicalizer; (4) exact name matching for ontology-poor types (anatomy, REACTOME pathways); and (5) embedding-based fuzzy matching with UMLS lookup (SapBERT and ClinicalBERT) for free-text microbiome concepts. We applied the pipeline to a 698-concept gut-microbiome benchmark spanning taxa, pathways, and disease labels, validated grouping decisions against the curated SSSOM mappings released by the MONDO project, and audited the ClinicalBERT consolidation against five clinical-genetics case studies drawn from the literature. Results. Per-type pairwise coverage was strikingly asymmetric. Genes/proteins and the three Gene Ontology categories aligned cleanly across PrimeKG and Hetionet (mutual coverage 94-99%), but disease overlap was sparse: only 0.7% of PrimeKG individual disease nodes mapped to Hetionet, rising to 2.0% after MONDO grouping (versus 78.7% and 18.4% from the Hetionet side). PrimeKG-to-UMLS coverage spanned 100% (effect/phenotype via HPO) down to 20.8% (REACTOME pathways), with drugs at 73.7% and anatomy at 58.8%. PrimeKG-to-PharmGKB drug coverage required up to two bridging hops (DrugBank -> UMLS -> RxNorm/ATC/MeSH). Bigger was not uniformly more complete: on a 698-concept microbiome drug benchmark, Hetionet missed 0 concepts while PrimeKG missed 16. ClinicalBERT-based grouping consolidated 22,205 raw MONDO disease nodes into 17,080 groups but introduced three reproducible failure modes documented in case studies: (i) peer over-merging: for example, all 22 osteogenesis imperfecta subtypes collapsed into a single node despite distinct severity classes; (ii) parent-child collapse: e.g. acute myeloid leukemia merged with myeloid leukemia, erasing the acute/chronic distinction that drives clinical management; and (iii) lexical false positives: neurofibromatosis and schwannomatosis grouped together despite cellular-pathology differences. Discussion. Identifier matching alone is a weak baseline for biomedical KG integration. Cross-ontology bridges and embedding-based consolidation expand coverage but do so at the cost of clinically meaningful resolution, and the resulting failures are systematic rather than random. Reporting only aggregate coverage statistics obscures these losses, which propagate silently into downstream tasks. Conclusion. We provide reusable per-type coverage tables, a taxonomy of three integration failure modes, and concrete recommendations for downstream studies that depend on a unified biomedical KG. We argue that future KG integration work should report per-type coverage and per-cluster confidence rather than aggregate match rates.
Fayette, L.; Brendel, K.; Mentre, F.
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Joint modelling of longitudinal data using non-linear mixed effects models and time-to-event outcomes provides a suitable framework to account for informative censoring when estimating biomarker dynamics and quantifying event risk using covariates and longitudinal trajectories. Their usefulness in clinical research depends on data collection design, particularly to precisely estimate the association (link) parameter between longitudinal and survival processes. However, optimal design strategies have so far been addressed separately for longitudinal and survival endpoints and remain unexplored for joint models. We propose two Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) computation methods for joint models, relying on Monte-Carlo integration over observations combined with either Markov Chains Monte-Carlo or Adaptive Gaussian Quadrature to integrate random effects. Their accuracy is assessed against clinical trial simulations in an oncological example based on the HORIZON III study with a tumour-growth-survival model including discrete and continuous covariates. We apply these methods to quantify the impact of follow-up duration, sampling richness, sample size, and covariate distribution on parameter uncertainty and test power. In our example, longitudinal-parameter uncertainty is barely affected by follow-up duration or sampling richness, whereas survival-parameter uncertainty decreases substantially from 1-year to 2-year follow-up. The number of subjects needed (NSN) to achieve <15\% uncertainty on the link parameter is comparable for a 2-year rich design and a 3-year sparse design. Optimal covariate distributions are stable across designs and systematically improve test power, outperforming longer and richer but non-optimised designs. These FIM-based methods accurately predict uncertainty and test powers, enabling design evaluation and NSN computation for joint-model-based clinical studies.
Elemento, O.; Sigaras, A.; Colonel, J.; Hajirasouliha, I.; Ghosh, S.; Bensoussan, Y.; Bridge2AI-Voice Consortium, ; Rameau, A.
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Vocal biomarkers, encompassing voice and speech, have largely been developed for individual conditions in isolation, limiting their generalizability across diseases and recording settings. To address this, we introduce VoiceFM, a contrastive model that learns general-purpose clinical voice representations by aligning audio embeddings with rich clinical metadata. Using the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset (984 primarily English-speaking adult participants, 846 used for training and 138 held out as a temporally separated validation cohort, 40,056 recordings totaling 176 hours across 5 academic medical centers), VoiceFM pairs a fine-tuned Whisper large-v2 encoder with a tabular transformer over 44 clinical features via symmetric InfoNCE loss. Linear probes on frozen VoiceFM embeddings achieve mean AUROC 0.952 +/- 0.005 across five evaluation tasks (control vs disease screening plus four disease categories), significantly outperforming Frozen Whisper (0.926 +/- 0.013, p = 0.013), Frozen HuBERT (0.885 +/- 0.017, p = 0.0009), and the contrastively trained VoiceFM-HuBERT (0.938 +/- 0.006, p = 0.012). On the 138-participant held-out cohort, VoiceFM-Whisper achieves AUROCs of 0.99 for Alzheimer's/dementia/MCI and 0.89 for airway stenosis, demonstrating that the learned representations generalize to participants the model has never seen. VoiceFM representations transfer to three external datasets without retraining and improve few-shot classification. Recording task attribution identifies a small set of speech tasks that match or exceed the full battery's performance, suggesting shorter screening protocols are feasible. Trained predominantly on English audio, VoiceFM transfers without fine-tuning to Spanish-language Parkinson's disease (PD) detection (NeuroVoz, 107 participants, AUROC 0.93 +/- 0.02), with the signal dominated by articulatory rather than phonatory features. A fine-tuned classifier achieves participant-level AUROC 0.87 (sustained 0.85, countdown 0.80) on the mPower smartphone study (585 held-out participants). Together, these results show that contrastive alignment between voice and rich clinical metadata can serve as the basis for a clinical voice foundation model, producing a single set of transferable representations that generalize across diseases, languages, recording conditions, and patients enrolled after model freeze.
Zhao, J.; Ahmadi, S.-A.; Decker, J.; Zwergal, A.; Eulenburg, P. z.; Flanagin, V. L.; Wuehr, M.
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Quantitative eye movement analysis is important for neuro- logical diagnostics, yet existing video-oculography (VOG) systems typ- ically require calibration, device-specific settings, or accurate gaze la- bels. We present VOGeo-Gaze, a real-time, calibration-free, geometry- aware neural network that estimates gaze by reconstructing anatomi- cally meaningful eyeball parameters from image features. The method combines segmentation-driven projection geometry, a refraction-aware pupil correction module, and temporal anatomical stabilization, so gaze is derived from interpretable eye geometry rather than direct angular regression. Trained only on the public TEyeD dataset with weak gaze supervision, VOGeo-Gaze was evaluated on 116 clinical recordings from 17 patients and 19 healthy subjects using EyeSeeCam, a clinical gold- standard VOG system. It achieved median absolute angular errors of 0.33{whitebullet} horizontally and 0.35{whitebullet} vertically, with nearly 92% of recordings below 1{whitebullet} error while operating at >300 FPS. These results demonstrate sub-degree clinical gaze estimation without subject-specific calibration, camera intrinsics, or accurate gaze labels, providing a scalable and inter- pretable alternative to conventional VOG pipelines. Code is available at https://github.com/DSGZ-MotionLab/VOGeo-Gaze.
Minoccheri, C.; Joo, P.; Hu, X.-S.; Affendi, H.; Elayyan, F.; Harville, A.; McDonald, N. J.; Botero, T.; DaSilva, A. F.
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Neuroimaging based pain decoding faces two underappreciated challenges: between subject variability that prevents classifiers from generalizing across patients, and within session cross validation designs that inflate reported accuracy by conflating within person and between person variance. Here we address both using portable functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during pharmacologically verified local nerve anesthesia. Twentyfive patients with clinically painful teeth underwent 36 channel bilateral fNIRS during percussion before ("Pre") and after ("Post") local nerve anesthesia. In 13 block-success patients, a paired Pre versus Post comparison with healthy tooth control identified three temporal hemodynamic response function (HRF) features (late slope, mean first derivative, and baseline normalized amplitude) whose analgesia interaction effects (d = 0.63 to 0.79) exceeded that of raw general linear model (GLM) amplitude (d = 0.56), with a significant difference-in-differences interaction (p = 0.011). Per-patient calibration with these features yielded leave one subject out (LOSO) AUC = 0.68 to 0.76 for nonlinear classifiers (permutation p = 0.002), with HbO-specific feature selection achieving the best performance (RF AUC = 0.760); a healthy tooth negative control was non-significant. End to end deep learning on raw time series (CNN LSTM AUC = 0.719) was competitive with feature based classifiers, while linear models did not reach significance. Critically, head to head comparison of within-session CV and LOSO on the same data revealed mean inflation of +0.13 AUC across all model types, including deep learning, demonstrating that high within session accuracy alone does not establish subject-independent validity. Exploratory analyses suggested complementary roles for oxyhemoglobin (HbO; within patient analgesia detection) and deoxyhemoglobin (HbR; cross patient information), and that trial to trial response variability may complement amplitude for cross patient pain detection. These results show that per patient calibration with temporal HRF features supports subject independent analgesic-state detection under strict LOSO evaluation, and that within-session validation (standard in the fNIRS pain- decoding literature) can substantially overestimate performance.
Liu, T.; Zeng, X.; Snitz, B. E.; Karikari, T. K.; Deek, R. A.
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Blood biomarker models are increasingly used in Alzheimer's disease and related dementia translational research, but predictive performance can be inflated when the same dataset is used for both model development and evaluation. We assess the effect of data double dipping using simulations and NULISA proteomic data from the MYHAT-NI community-based cohort to predict brain amyloid-beta neuroimaging status. In both settings, training AUC increased as more biomarkers were added, while testing AUC peaked earlier and then declined. These findings show that data double dipping can inflate model performance and highlight the need for external validation or internal validation with data partitioning.
Sharma, R.; Beeche, C.; Dong, J.; Zhuang, R.; Qu, H.; Zhang, R.; Gangaram, V.; Goswami, P.; Xin, J.; Ballard, J.; Goldberg, A.; Sagreiya, H.; Long, Q.; Chen, T.; Witschey, W. R.
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The surge in medical imaging has spurred the development of vision-language models (VLMs) to alleviate radiologist workloads. However, clinical deployment is hindered by the lack of meaningful evaluation frameworks. Current metrics - ranging from semantic similarity to large language model (LLM) based judges - often fail to distinguish between clinically trivial and critical discrepancies, poorly reflecting real-world clinical judgment. To address this, we introduce DISCERN (Discordance and Significance-aware Entity-level Radiology Report Comparison). DISCERN is a significance-aware framework that weighs report errors based on their potential impact on patient care. Our results demonstrate that DISCERN powered by closed source LLMs aligns more closely with expert radiologist assessments than traditional metrics or current LLM evaluators, providing a more interpretable and clinically relevant benchmark. By modeling radiologist prioritization and entity-level feedback, DISCERN facilitates targeted model refinement and ensures the safer integration of generative AI into clinical workflows.
Lu, S.; Ruan, X.; Wang, L.; Wang, X.; Sameer, M.; Liu, H.
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Although GLP1/GIP receptor agonists demonstrate unprecedented weight loss efficacy, their rapid clinical adoption has revealed significant real-world tolerability challenges. To evaluate their dynamic safety profiles, we developed a macro to micro pharmacovigilance framework by combining global FAERS reports with local UT Physician EHR. Macroscopically, we distilled 17 shared adverse events across the drug class from FAERS with disproportionality analysis. Microscopically, local EHR data (289,655 longitudinal treatment sessions across 71,316 patients) revealed 51.6% of GLP1 sessions terminated within 90 days. Furthermore, temporal stratified logistic regression demonstrated that initial exposure (0 to 30 days) correlated strongly with nausea and vomiting, which attenuated in extended sessions, whereas extended exposure (>2 years) uncovered late onset risks, notably incident hepatic steatosis. Ultimately, this time aware framework reveals that GLP1 safety profiles are profoundly duration dependent, providing critical insights into both acute intolerances and long-term medication safety.
Mosquera, J. V.; Tang, I.; Murach, M.; Auguste, G.; Kodali, A.; Hart, P.; Shaw, D. M.; Li, M.; Turner, A. W.; Hodonsky, C. J.; Dworak, N. M.; de Oliveira, A. K.; Sol-Church, K.; Jhee, T.; van der Sijs, K. I. M.; Adkar, S. S.; Choi, R. B.; Vacante, F.; Wu, J. C.; Cheng, P.; Giannarelli, C.; Leeper, N. J.; Finn, A. V.; Bjorkegren, J. L. M.; Kovacic, J. C.; Yurdagul, A.; van der Laan, S. W.; Miller, C. L.
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Advances in single-cell and spatial assays have revolutionized the scale and resolution of molecular tissue profiling. Here we present MetaPlaq, a multimodal atlas of human atherosclerotic arterial beds comprising over a million cells across single-cell transcriptomics, epigenomics and high-resolution spatial expression assays. We map granular cell states and disease-relevant transcriptional programs within the native tissue context of coronary arteries. Furthermore, we map cardiovascular GWAS signals to smooth muscle cells (SMCs) and endothelial cells (ECs) and uncover the cis-regulatory architecture governing their phenotypic transitions. Our comprehensive epigenomic reference allowed us to build cell-specific enhancer-gene link maps and multimodal gene regulatory networks (GRNs) underlying disease-relevant states such as osteogenic SMCs and ECs undergoing mesenchymal transition. We also integrate SMC and EC disease-associated gene sets with GRNs to nominate key transcription factors such as PRRX1, BNC2 and ELK3 regulating atherosclerosis-relevant transcriptional programs. Finally, we layer single-cell and spatial modalities to fine-map GWAS variants with improved cell and anatomical context. We highlight candidate cell-specific regulatory mechanisms at less characterized CAD loci, including FGD5 and MCF2L in ECs. Together, this atlas represents an important step towards fully interpreting genetic risk loci and informing new therapeutic strategies for cardiovascular disease.
Schmidlechner, T.; Stumpo, V.; Jehli, E.; Zerweck, L.; Bellomo, J.; Gönel, M.; Müller, F.; Sebök, M.; Bink, A.; Kulcsar, Z.; Weller, M.; Regli, L.; Fierstra, J.; van Niftrik, C. H. B.
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Hypoxia-targeted BOLD MRI is a novel technique, which probes oxygenation physiology in response to a controlled transient hypoxia stimulus. In glioblastoma, the signal response is spatially and temporally heterogeneous. We developed a voxel-wise temporal decomposition framework for hypoxia-targeted BOLD MRI that separates the arrival of responses, transition phases, and steady state during controlled isocapnic hypoxia. Twenty healthy controls underwent 3-T BOLD MRI during a double hypoxic step challenge to establish a normative reference. Three patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma were included as proof-of-concept cases. For each voxel, we estimated response arrival delay (Delaycorr), delay to plateau, delay to return and an O2-normalized steady-state response (HypoxiaSS). Healthy-control maps were used to construct a voxel-wise normative atlas and, for HypoxiaSS, a global-response-adjusted model for patient deviation mapping. In healthy controls, HypoxiaSS showed lower supratentorial between-subject variabilitythan both whole-stimulus comparators (coefficient of variation: 1.77 versus 2.36 for Hypoxiaavg) and higher voxel-level step-to-step agreement (ICC(2,1): median 0.951 versus 0.792 for Hypoxiaavg). Whole-stimulus averaging exhibited a systematic step-2 signal amplification present in 19 of 20 subjects, which was absent from HypoxiaSS. Asingle global response scalar explained a median 72.5% of voxel-wise between-subject variance in HypoxiaSS. In proof-of-concept patient analyses, G-adjusted HypoxiaSS deviation maps and timing maps identified spatially coherentabnormalities that were partly complementary and extended beyond conventional MRI-defined lesion margins.Temporal decomposition improves the stability and interpretability of hypoxia-targeted BOLD MRI and provides a practical framework for population-referenced physiological mapping and atlas-based deviation mapping in glioblastoma.
Casalino-Matsuda, S. M.; Guggilla, V.; Gao, C. A.; Demeulenaere, K. E.; Cusick, L. P.; Fenske, S. W.; Yu, Z.; Lu, Z.; Swaminathan, S.; Grant, R. A.; Schleck, M. J.; Prakriya, M.; Hebbar, S.; Stauderman, K.; Donnelly, H. K.; Pickens, C.; Morales-Nebreda, L.; The NU SCRIPT Study Investigators, ; Wunderink, R. G.; Misharin, A. V.; Singer, B. D.; Budinger, G. S.
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Viral pneumonia is perpetuated by inflammatory circuits between activated T cells and monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages (MoAM). T cells and macrophages express ORAI1 and STIM1, which form calcium release-activated calcium (CRAC) channels that allow extracellular calcium entry in response to endoplasmic reticulum calcium store depletion. In a randomized, placebo-controlled, multicenter phase 2 trial (CARDEA), Auxora, a CRAC channel inhibitor, reduced all-cause 30-day mortality by 56% in patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia. Here, we report a multi-omics analysis of serially collected alveolar samples from unvaccinated patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia treated with Auxora versus placebo. We found reductions in plasma levels of the monocyte- and T cell-chemokines, CCL8 and PDGF-AA. Using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from healthy volunteers, we show that Auxora directly targets T cells to inhibit the transcription of CCL8 and PDGFA in monocyte-derived macrophages, supporting a mechanism for its effects and a potential intermediate biomarker of efficacy.
Cavon, J.; Perez, C.; Quinn-Bohmann, N.; Magis, A. T.; Gibbons, S. M.
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Emerging evidence links the gut microbiome to sleep quality, yet measuring sleep at scale remains challenging. Commercial wearables, such as Fitbit, capture objective sleep and activity data in naturalistic settings. We integrated Fitbit data from a large, deeply-phenotyped cohort with paired lifestyle and health questionnaires. Wearable-derived measures aligned well with self-reported sleep, activity, and happiness. We identified dozens of covariate-adjusted associations between Fitbit-derived sleep features, lifestyle factors, and multi-omic data. Among molecular feature sets, the gut microbiome showed the greatest number of associations with sleep quality: butyrate-producing genera were positively associated with sleep and amplified the benefits of physical activity. Oscillospira, in particular, was consistently associated with better sleep. In blood, insulin, omega-3, and cortisol correlated with poorer sleep, whereas lower alcohol intake and mineral supplements correlated with better sleep. These robust, covariate-adjusted findings advance mechanistic understanding of the gut-sleep axis and broader molecular and lifestyle determinants of sleep quality.
Callet, C.; Bertrand, M.; Guzman, K.; Mece, P.; Rossi, E. A.; Grieve, K.
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The retinal nerve fiber layer, composed of axon bundles converging toward the optic nerve, is a key biomarker for diagnosing and monitoring glaucoma and other neurodegenerative diseases. High-resolution en face imaging of individual nerve fiber bundles offers morphological information beyond what conventional optical coherence tomography provides, yet clinical integration remains limited by the lack of automated analysis tools and normative data. Here, we imaged 14 healthy volunteers using time-domain full-field optical coherence tomography and adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, and developed automated pipelines to quantify bundle width, trajectory, tortuosity, and orientation. Bundles were on average 25% wider at shallower retinal depths, width measurements were consistent across imaging modalities, and estimated axon count per bundle decreased significantly with age. Global trajectory analysis revealed systematic deviations of high resolution data from existing mathematical models, particularly in the temporal sector, leading us to propose two refined trajectory models. These normative results provide a foundation for high resolution biomarkers for use in investigations of retinal neurodegeneration.
Poulakis, K.; Ioannou, K.; Bezgin, G.; Chiotis, K.; Iturria-Medina, Y.
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Can we decode Alzheimers disease (AD) heterogeneity into a few portable axes that capture how amyloid-{beta}, tau and neurodegeneration (A-T-N) spatially co vary in vivo? To answer this question, we built a pipeline that harmonizes longitudinal amyloid-{beta}/tau PET and T1 MRI (gray matter) from ADNI cohort (12,430 images) with mixed effects modeling and then derived stage specific multimodal axes (mVCs) using linked component analysis, with robustness tested in simulations and external validation in the OASIS cohort (4,958 images). We identified a small set of multimodal axes that (i) recapitulate early tau weighted variation in cognitively unimpaired (CU) individuals, AD like A-T-N coupling in cognitively impaired (CI) individuals and atypical CU and CI participants with posterior (precuneus/occipitoparietal) and fronto insular/frontal weighted patterns, (ii) map onto domain specific cognition, APOE e4, and blood/CSF biomarkers of neurodegeneration, neuroaxonal injury and astrocyte activation, (iii) predict clinical transitions, (iv) generalize in an independent cohort, and (v) demonstrate modelling robustness to missing data, high dimensionality, and cross-cohort variability, enabling direct application of the extracted axes to new datasets for biomarker discovery and stratification. Multimodal axes provide a portable, interpretable layer for quantifying amyloid-{beta}-tau-neurodegeneration coupling at the individual level, complementing current biomarker-based staging frameworks based on A-T-N status and tau PET topography, and can be computed on new datasets to aid clinical assessment and trial enrichment.
Wang, S.; Mapar, P.; Moldovan, N.; van der Pol, Y.; Safrastyan, A.; van Werkhoven, E.; Tantyo, N. A.; Snieder, B.; Do Brito Valente, A. F.; de Jong, A. V.; Dinmohamed, A.; Drees, E. E. E.; Roemer, M. G. M.; Ylstra, B.; Klerk, C. P. W.; Strobbe, L.; Sandberg, Y.; Boersma, R. S.; Koene, H.; Pruijt, H.; de Heer, K.; van Rijn, R.; Bilgin, Y. M.; de Jongh, E.; Nijland, M.; van der Poel, M.; Koster, A.; Nieuwenhuizen, L.; Fijnheer, R.; Beeker, A.; Mous, R.; Vergote, V. K. J.; Vermaat, J. S. P.; Pegtel, D. M.; Chamuleau, M. E. D.; Mouliere, F.
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Curative-intent immunochemotherapy fails in ~30% of patients with large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL), yet no validated molecular tool enables early identification of high-risk individuals to guide treatment intensification. Using shallow whole genome sequencing (sWGS) of plasma cell-free DNA from 190 LBCL patients, we developed and validated the ACT score (Aberrations, fragment Composition, Terminal motifs), a composite classifier integrating genomic and fragmentomic features from a single post-cycle-1 sample. ACT-positive patients had worse 2-year outcomes versus ACT-negative patients: time-to-progression 29% vs. 83% (HR 4.4, 95% CI 1.9 - 10.0; P = 1.5 x 10 - 4) and overall survival 47% vs. 93% (HR 8.7, 95% CI 3.0 - 25.4; P = 1.8 x 10-6). ACT score was independently prognostic of the International Prognostic Index, and their combination identified the highest-risk patients. Unlike mutation-based approaches, this assay requires neither tumor tissue, germline control nor a baseline plasma sample. Built on open-source tools and sWGS, the ACT score offers a feasible scalable strategy for early risk stratification in aggressive LBCL.
Anderson, E.; Kist, A.; Simon, Z. D.; Raj, J.; Ray, S.; Astudillo, D.; Becker, N.; Norbu, T.; Khim, S.; Lambert, D.; Alvarez, J.; Kadlec, K.; Allawala, A. B.; Tremblay-McGaw, A.; Verhein, J.; Racine, C.; Naldec, P.; Alhourani, A.; Piper, K.; Fan, J.; Wang, D. D.; Khambhatti, A. N.; Sellers, K. K.; Starr, P. A.; Sugrue, L. P.; Chang, E. F.; Krystal, A. D.; Lee, A. M.
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Pathological activity within frontal cortical circuits is common in many neuropsychiatric disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We developed an invasive brain mapping protocol in which temporary electrodes are implanted in candidate sites to identify personalized stimulation targets that can acutely relieve OCD symptoms. We found that stimulation within segments of the anterior limb of the internal capsule (ALIC) focally suppressed the structurally and functionally connected region of prefrontal and cingulate cortex. By leveraging the topographic organization of the ALIC, we reversibly inactivated frontal cortical sites with ALIC stimulation to determine which cortical regions are necessary for sustaining OCD symptoms. Stimulation of ventral capsule (VC) near the globus pallidus within the ALIC was associated with suppression of lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity and acute and long-term improvements in OCD symptoms. These results provide a paradigm for leveraging ALIC topography to deliver targeted connectomic neuromodulation to frontal cortex to treat neuropsychiatric disorders.
Berger, C. G.; Puttfarcken, B.; Qiu, J.; Hauer, I.; Herr, S.; Juestel, D.; Pleitez, M. A.
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We present a compact pump-and-probe mid-infrared Optothermal Spectrometer (OTHES) equipped with Spatial Probing and Autocorrection (SPAC) optimized for robust intravital application in humans. SPAC-OTHES facilitates alignment stability and spectral comparability across different measurement sessions involving different skin types. Contrary to state-of-the-art, SPAC-OTHES uses camera-based beam detection and an auto-calibration mechanism that enables ca. 73% better spectral reproducibility in intravital measurements in human volunteers than non-calibrated readouts. Moreover, SPAC-OTHES has the potential to lower the glucose quantification error, as demonstrated here in artificial skin phantoms, where an improvement of 52% compared to conventional diode-based detection was observed. The compactness of OTHES, combined with reliable SPAC-readout, has the potential to accelerate commercialization and broad application of biosensors based on mid-infrared spectroscopy.