A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals - those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses - has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched the surface of the world of viruses - but it is likely that only a few cause disease.

In a review of published studies addressing patients' perceptions and factors influencing their reporting of adverse drug reactions, most patients were not aware of reporting systems and others were confused about reporting. For those patients who did report their experiences with adverse drug reactions, the main motivation was to prevent similar suffering in other patients.

No one can deny that men and women have different genes, biology and anatomical features. However, only a minority of medical studies take this into account when analyzing and reporting research results. Time to hold researchers accountable, argue two leading experts on sex and gender, not just for the sake of equity, but mainly for the sake of health.

Most antibiotics in use today are based on natural molecules produced by bacteria - and given the rise of antibiotic resistance, there's an urgent need to find more of them. Yet coaxing bacteria to produce new antibiotics is a tricky proposition. Most bacteria won't grow in the lab. And even when they do, most of the genes that cause them to churn out molecules with antibiotic properties never get switched on.

Knowing the likely course of cancer can influence treatment decisions. Now a new prediction model published today in Lancet Oncology offers a more accurate prognosis for a patient's metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. The approach was as novel as the result - while researchers commonly work in small groups, intentionally isolating their data, the current study embraces the call in Joe Biden's "Cancer Moonshot" to open their question and their data, collecting previously published clinical trial data and calling for worldwide collaboration to evaluate its predictive power.

Immunotherapy has revolutionized treatment options in oncology, neurology, and many infectious diseases and now there is fresh hope that the same method could be used to treat or functionally cure HIV, according to two related studies from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The human body produces T cells to recognize and fight disease. Each T cell has a unique T cell receptor (or TCR) on its surface that surveils small fragments of proteins presented by other cells. Upon detecting evidence of cancer or infection, a subset of T cells binds the diseased cells and orchestrates their elimination. When tumors and infections cannot be eradicated naturally, researchers employ immunotherapies to boost the immune system's effectiveness.