PATHOLOGY: Familiar Antibiotic Slows Prostate Cancer Growth
Chemotherapy has been the least well-developed approach in the fight against prostate cancer. Part of the problem has been the lack of a good target. Norie Yoshioka (on right), Guo-fu Hu, and colleagues report that they have discovered such a target—angiogenin. They have also identified a drug, the old-line antibiotic neomycin, that effectively blocks it. The findings appear in the Sept. 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

PUBLIC HEALTH: Gaping Disparity Reported in Life Span Across U.S.
A study in the September PLoS Medicine of U.S. health disparities sorted by race and geography shows continuing large differences in life expectancy. Chronic diseases and injuries in young and middle-aged adults cause most of the premature deaths, while access to health care does not seem to be a big factor for the gap. In concert with efforts to correct the broader underlying social inequalities that sustain these patterns, Christopher Murray (on left), Majid Ezzati, and their co-authors believe public health professionals could make substantial progress by classic interventions such as targeting high blood pressure, high blood sugar, inactivity, diet, tobacco, and alcohol.

IMMUNOLOGY: Tripwire Uncovered for “Exhausted” T Cells in HIV Infection
CD8, or killer, T cells remain in the blood of people infected with HIV, but seem to lose function over time. This state has been described as “T cell exhaustion.” In the Sept. 21 Nature, a team including Bruce Walker (not pictured), Gordon Freeman (on left), and Daniel Kaufmann, as well as scientists at Emory University, Oxford University, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, shows that a receptor on the surface of T cells, PD-1, gets switched on in exhausted cells in HIV patients. The PD-1 receptor represents a specific, reversible mechanism responsible for the T cells’ ailment.