Autoimmune encephalomyelitis is a chronic autoimmune disease caused by immune-mediated sterile inflammatory response and demyelination in the central nervous system (CNS). High-mobility group box protein 1 (HMGB1) is a ubiquitous nuclear protein, which can be released from damaged cells and induce proinflammatory responses in autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Glycyrrhizin (GL), a major constituent of licorice root, can inhibit the proinflammatory bioactivities of HMGB1. In this article, we bring some insight into the effects of GL on CNS inflammatory diseases and discuss the therapeutic potential of GL in autoimmune encephalomyelitis in the future.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is extremely complex for both causal mechanism and clinical manifestation, requiring efforts to uncover its diversity and the corresponding mechanisms. Here, we applied a modelling analysis to investigate the regulation divergence among a large-scale cohort of AD patients. We found that transcription regulation tended to get degenerated in AD patients, which contributed to disease development and the detrimental clinical outcomes, mainly by disrupting protein degradation, neuroinflammation, mitochondrial and synaptic functions. To measure the accumulated effects, we came up with a new concept, regulation loss burden, which better correlated with AD related clinical manifestations and the ageing process. The epigenetic studies to multiple active regulation marks also supported a tendency of regulation loss in AD patients. Our finding can lead to a unified model as AD causal mechanism, where AD and its diversity are contributed by accumulated degeneration of transcriptional regulation. The significance of this study is that: (1) it is the first system biology investigation to transcription regulation divergence among AD patients; (2) we observed an accumulated degeneration of transcription regulation, which well correlates with detrimental clinical outcomes; (3) transcriptional degeneration also contributes to the ageing process, where its correlation with ages is up to 0.78.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) with increased transmissibility and partial resistance to neutralization by antibodies has been observed globally. There is an urgent need for an effective vaccine to combat these variants. Our study demonstrated that the B.1.351 variant inactivated vaccine candidate (B.1.351V) generated strong binding and neutralizing antibody responses in BALB/c mice against the B.1.351 virus and other SARS-CoV-2 variants after two doses within 28 days. Immunized K18-hACE2 mice also exhibited elevated levels of live virus-neutralizing antibodies against various SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Following infection with these viruses, K18-hACE2 mice displayed a stable body weight, a high survival rate, minimal virus copies in lung tissue, and no lung damage compared to the control group. These findings indicate that B.1.351V offered protection against infection with multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants in mice, providing insights for the development of a vaccine targeting SARS-CoV-2 VOCs for human use.