By GRACIE BLACKWELL, TEXAS A&M COLLEGE OF MEDICINE DECEMBER 8, 2021 The expression of the immune response gene ??NLRC5 (red purple) is suppressed in SARS-CoV-2 (green) infected cells. Credit: Koichi Kobayashi A discovery by researchers at the Texas A&M College of Medicine could lead to new therapies to prevent the virus from proliferating in the human body....
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A common strategy to make vaccines more powerful is to deliver them along with an adjuvant—a compound that stimulates the immune system to produce a stronger response. Researchers from MIT, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and other institutions have now designed a new nanoparticle adjuvant that...
by Harvard Medical School Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The cliché “you are what you eat” has been used for hundreds of years to illustrate the link between diet and health. Now, an international team of researchers has found the molecular proof of this concept, demonstrating how diet ultimately affects immunity through the gut microbiome. The work,...
by The Wistar Institute HIV-1 Virus. Credit: J Roberto Trujillo/Wikipedia A new study by researchers at The Wistar Institute, an international biomedical research leader in cancer, immunology, infectious disease, and vaccine development, shows how key features on the surface of HIV-infected cells help the disease evade detection by the immune system. It also shows how these...
by Bill Hathaway, Yale University Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A simple RNA molecule jumpstarts the immune system’s “first responders” to viral infection and can even eradicate the SARS-CoV-2 virus in mice with chronic cases of COVID-19, a new Yale School of Medicine study finds. The molecule, known as SLR14, is a simple, easy to manufacture, loop...
by Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Dendritic cell. Credit: D. Dudziak COVID-19 reduces the numbers and functional competence of certain types of immune cells in the blood, say LMU researchers. This could affect responses to secondary infections. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causes moderate to severe disease in 3–10% of those infected. In such cases, the immune system...
by University of Bath Micrograph showing inflammation of the large bowel in a case of inflammatory bowel disease. Colonic biopsy. Credit: Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0 An international team of scientists has identified a new connection between certain molecules produced by the microbiome and the function of a protein that impacts gut inflammation. This finding takes researchers from...
Trillions of benign bacteria live in the intestine. They are kept in a continuous balance by the immune system, which thereby makes them harmless to humans. Researchers in the Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern and Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, and German Cancer Research Center have been able to show how...
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Credit: CC0 Public Domain Immunotherapy is a promising strategy to treat cancer by stimulating the body’s own immune system to destroy tumor cells, but it only works for a handful of cancers. MIT researchers have now discovered a new way to jump-start the immune system to attack tumors, which they hope...
by Hayley Dunning, Imperial College London Cryo-electron microscopy structure of the soluble membrane attack complex shows how chaperone protein, clusterin (pink), helps to prevent immune activation complexes (blue) from damaging human cells. Credit: Imperial College London Scientists have discovered how special proteins in the blood prevent our immune system from harming our own cells with overproduced...
