Guardians at the Gate: Optimization of Small Molecule Entry Inhibitors of Ebola and Marburg Viruses.

Ebola and Marburg (EBOV and MARV) filoviral infections lead to fatal hemorrhagic fevers and have caused over 30 outbreaks in the last 50 years. Currently, there are no FDA-approved small molecule therapeutics for effectively treating filoviral diseases. To address this unmet medical need, we have conducted a systematic structural optimization of an early lead compound, -(4-(4-methylpiperidin-1-yl)-3-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)-4-(morpholinomethyl)benzamide (), borne from our previously reported hit-to-lead effort.

Dissociation of Human and Mouse Tumor Tissue Samples for Single-cell RNA Sequencing.

Human tumor samples hold a plethora of information about their microenvironment and immune repertoire. Effective dissociation of human tissue samples into viable cell suspensions is a required input for the single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) pipeline. Unlike bulk RNA sequencing approaches, scRNAseq enables us to infer the transcriptional heterogeneity in tumor specimens at the single-cell level.

Sodium chloride in the tumor microenvironment enhances T cell metabolic fitness and cytotoxicity.

The efficacy of antitumor immunity is associated with the metabolic state of cytotoxic T cells, which is sensitive to the tumor microenvironment. Whether ionic signals affect adaptive antitumor immune responses is unclear. In the present study, we show that there is an enrichment of sodium in solid tumors from patients with breast cancer.