Academic researchers, along with scientists at NCI Frederick, are repurposing a harmless bacterial virus to reactivate dormant HIV-infected T cells—a type of white blood cell—for destruction. Their proof-of-concept study, published in iScience, is an early step in testing this platform.

Nadya Tarasova, Ph.D., clicked her mouse a few times, repositioning some letters and lines on her computer screen. The program on display looked like it could be Photoshop’s distant cousin, but even an uninitiated onlooker could’ve seen this wasn’t artwork. It was SLICE, one of the world’s first—and newest—chemistry coding programs to have a graphical interface.

Experts across scientific fields will convene at Hood College in Frederick, MD, from June 16–18 for the fourth Life Sciences Symposium, aiming to ameliorate the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in research. The three-day symposium is intended to devise and drive solutions to reproducibility issues in biomedical sciences.

Tools developed by chemists at NCI Frederick have at last made it possible to see how some of the most common molecules affect cells’ behavior in cancer and disease. Studying these molecules, glycans, because they can’t directly be sequenced, has been challenging. New research from NCI Frederick’s Chemical Biology Laboratory (CBL) may make it easier.

A study originating in NCI Frederick’s RNA Biology Laboratory has clarified why cells pack up and discard a certain type of RNA. Put simply, it’s a trash removal system meant to keep cells stable—and it’s relevant to cancer growth. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, came by examining the RNAs within extracellular vesicles.