This year marks the 35th anniversary of Professor Walter Wahli’s discovery of the PPARs (Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors) family of nuclear hormone receptors. To mark the occasion, the editors of the scientific periodical Biomolecules decided to publish a special issue in his honor. This paper summarizes what is known about PPARs and shows how trends have changed and how research on PPARs has evolved. The article also highlights the importance of PPARs and what role they play in various diseases and ailments. The paper is in a mixed form; essentially it is a review article, but it has been enriched with the results of our experiments. The selection of works was subjective, as there are more than 200,000 publications in the PubMed database alone. First, all papers done on an animal model were discarded at the outset. What remained was still far too large to describe directly. Therefore, only papers that were outstanding, groundbreaking, or simply interesting were described and briefly commented on.

Despite numerous studies conducted by various research teams, predicting long-term outcomes (known as Post-COVID-19 Syndrome, PCS) that may result from Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) remains challenging. PCS affects over a million people, primarily those with comorbid conditions. Therefore, it is crucial to undertake research aimed at developing a predictive model for early diagnosis of PCS, which in turn would enable faster preventive actions. The aim of this study was to assess the value of measuring and attempt a quantitative evaluation using Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) tests of three non-serum proteins, whose presence in the blood during COVID-19 was associated with severe disease progression: neutrophil elastase (NE), calcium-binding protein S100B, and neuron-specific enolase (NSE). The concentrations of these proteins were measured in blood serum samples collected before the COVID-19 pandemic from (1) patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM); (2) advanced stage diabetic nephropathy (NfT2DM); (3) a healthy group; and in blood serum samples collected two years after recovering from COVID-19 from patients with (4) T2DM and (5) NfT2DM. It was found that elevated levels of NE and NSE were significantly more common (p < 0.05) in patients with NfT2DM after recovering from COVID-19 compared to the other groups, while elevated levels of S100B were significantly more frequently observed in patients with T2DM after recovering from COVID-19 (p < 0.05). Demonstrating differences in the prevalence of NE, NSE, and S100B in individuals who recovered from COVID-19 with T2DM and NfT2DM makes these proteins important components of the developing predictive model for early detection of PCS. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing the significance of NE, NSE, and S100B in PCS in the context of T2DM and NfT2DM.

Due to the molecular mechanisms of action of antidiabetic drugs, they are considered to be effective in the treatment of both COVID-19 and the post-COVID-19 syndromes. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of administering insulin and metformin on the mortality of patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) with symptomatic COVID-19 with the use of logistic regression models. The association between death and insulin and metformin was weak and could not be included in the multivariate model. However, the interaction of both drugs with other factors, including remdesivir and low-molecular-weight heparin (metformin), age and hsCRP (insulin), modulated the odds of death. These interactions hint at multifaceted (anti-/pro-) associations of both insulin and metformin with the odds of death, depending on the patient’s characteristics. In the multivariate model, RDW-SD, adjusted with low-molecular-weight heparin treatment, age, sex and K⁺, was associated with mortality among patients with COVID-19 and T2DM. With a 15% increase in RDW-SD, the risk of death increased by 87.7%. This preliminary study provides the foundations for developing further, more personalized models to assess the risk of death in T2DM patients, as well as for identifying patients at an increased risk of death due to COVID-19.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of impairment of vision in the population over 50 years of age in developed countries. The most important risk factors for the development of AMD include increasing age, living in northern regions of Europe, genetic factors and smoking....