Astrocytes Shine - Glymphatic Surgery? - GLP1 & Addiction? - Fever Works

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Dec 3, 2025, 7:23:18 AMDec 3

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03912-w

The ‘silent’ brain cells that shape our behaviour, memory and health

Alison Abbott

For decades, neuroscientists focused almost exclusively on only half of the cells in the brain. Neurons were the main players, they thought, and everything else was made up of uninteresting support systems.

By the 2010s, memory researcher Inbal Goshen was beginning to question that assumption. She was inspired by innovative molecular tools that would allow her to investigate the contributions of another, more mysterious group of cells called astrocytes. What she discovered about their role in learning and memory excited her even more.

At the beginning, she felt like an outsider, especially at conferences. She imagined colleagues thinking, “Oh, that’s the weird one who works on astrocytes,” says Goshen, whose laboratory is at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A lot of people were sceptical, she says.

But not any more. A rush of studies from labs in many subfields are revealing just how important these cells are in shaping our behaviour, mood and memory. Long thought of as support cells, astrocytes are emerging as key players in health and disease.

“Neurons and neural circuits are the main computing units of the brain, but it’s now clear just how much astrocytes shape that computation,” says neurobiologist Nicola Allen at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who has spent her career researching astrocytes and other non-neuronal cells, collectively called glial cells. “Glial meetings are now consistently oversubscribed.”

As far back as the nineteenth century, scientists could see with their simple microscopes that mammalian brains included two major types of cell — neurons and glia — in roughly equal numbers.

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https://www.science.org/content/article/brain-s-plumbing-inspires-new-alzheimer-s-strategies-and-controversial-surgeries

Brain’s ‘plumbing’ inspires new Alzheimer’s strategies—and controversial surgeries

By Jennie Erin Smith

More than a decade ago, when researchers discovered a ghostly network of microscopic channels that push fluid through the brain, they began to wonder whether the brain’s plumbing, as they sometimes refer to it, might be implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Now, they are testing a host of ways to improve it.

At the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting last month in San Diego, several teams reported early promise for drugs and other measures that improve fluid flow, showing they can remove toxic proteins from animal or human brains and reverse symptoms in mouse models of neurological disease.

Plastic surgeons in China, meanwhile, have gone further, conducting experimental surgeries that they say help flush out disease-related proteins in people with Alzheimer’s. The trials have generated excitement but also concern over their bold claims of success. A group of academic surgeons in the United States is planning what they say will be a more rigorous clinical trial, also in Alzheimer’s patients, that could begin recruiting as early as next year.

The surgical approach “sounds unbelievable,” says neuroscientist Jeffrey Iliff of the University of Washington. “But I’m not going to say I know it can’t work. Remember, 13 years ago we didn’t know any of this existed.”

In 2012, Iliff, with pioneering Danish neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard and colleagues, described a previously unrecognized set of fluid channels in the brain that they dubbed the glymphatic system. Three years later, other groups revealed a second, related system of fluid transport: a matrix of tiny lymphatic vessels in the meninges, or membranes covering the brain.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03911-x

Will blockbuster obesity drugs revolutionize addiction treatment?

Elie Dolgin

Last April, neuroscientist Sue Grigson received an e-mail from a man detailing his years-long struggle to kick addiction — first to opioids, and then to the very medication meant to help him quit.

The man had stumbled on research by Grigson, suggesting that certain anti-obesity medications could help to reduce rats’ addiction to drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. He decided to try quitting again, this time while taking semaglutide, the blockbuster GLP-1 drug better known as Ozempic. “That’s when he wrote to me,” says Grigson, who works at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey. “He said that he was drug- and alcohol-free for the first time in his adult life.”

Stories like this have been spreading fast in the past few years, through online forums, weight-loss clinics and news headlines. They describe people taking diabetes and weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide (also marketed as Wegovy) and tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound) who find themselves suddenly able to shake long-standing addictions to cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs. And now, clinical data are starting to back them up.

Earlier this year, a team led by Christian Hendershot, a psychologist now at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, reported in a landmark randomized trial that weekly injections of semaglutide cut alcohol consumption1 — a key demonstration that GLP-1 drugs can alter addictive behaviour in people with a substance-use disorder. More than a dozen randomized clinical studies testing GLP-1 drugs for addiction are now under way worldwide, with some results expected in the next few months.

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https://www.npr.org/2025/11/27/nx-s1-5620766/fevers-viruses-cold-flu

Fever helps the body fight off viruses: But how does it work?

Jonathan Lambert

For centuries, the nature of a fever — and whether it's good or bad — has been hotly contested.

In ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates thought that fever had useful qualities, and could cook an illness out of a patient. Later on, around the 18th century, many physicians regarded fever as a distinct illness, one that could actually cook the patient, and so should be treated.

These days, researchers understand that fever is part of the immune system's response to a pathogen, one that's shared by many animal species. And while there's accumulating evidence that fevers can help kick an infection, precisely how they can help remains mysterious.
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"There's a cultural knowledge that there's this relationship between temperature and viruses, but at a molecular level, we're quite unsure how temperature might be impacting viruses," says Sam Wilson, a microbiologist at the University of Cambridge.

There are two main ideas, he says. The heat of a fever itself could be harming the virus, akin to Hippocrates' hypotheses. Alternatively, the heat is a means to an end, either stoking our immune system to work better, or simply a regrettable, but unavoidable byproduct of fighting off an infection.

"The fact that there weren't definitive answers to these questions piqued my interest," says Wilson. That interest led to a study, published Thursday in Science, that suggests — at least in mice — that elevated temperature alone is enough to fight off some viruses.