by Ciara O’shea, Trinity College Dublin When drugs to kill microbes are ineffective, host-directed therapy uses the body’s own immune system to deal with the infection. This approach is being tested in patients with COVID-19, and now a team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin has published a study showing how it might also work...
VIB (THE FLANDERS INSTITUTE FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY) Whether white blood cells can be found in the brain has been controversial, and what they might be doing used to be complete mystery. In a seminal study published in Cell, an international team of scientists led by Prof. Adrian Liston (VIB-KU Leuven, Belgium & Babraham Institute, UK) describe...
For every cell in the body there comes a time when it must decide what it wants to do for the rest of its life. In an article published in the journal PNAS, National Institutes of Health researchers report for the first time that ancient viral genes that were once considered “junk DNA” may play...
Dive Brief: India’s drug regulator has granted an emergency approval to the antibody drug itolizumab to treat the potentially deadly immune response, cytokine release syndrome, that appears to affect some patients hospitalized with acute respiratory distress related to COVID-19. The Drugs Controller General of India cleared the treatment for use after itolizumab, alongside standard of...
by University of Helsinki Activating the immune system is a promising form of cancer treatment. Researchers at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Hospital as well as the University of Eastern Finland mapped out the immune landscape of hematological malignancies in a dataset covering more than 10,000 patients to identify drug targets and patient...
Natural killer immune cells engineered to target the PD-L1 molecule can directly kill tumour cells in mice and reduce the numbers of immunosuppressive cells harbouring PD-L1 in mice and humans Scientists have engineered natural killer immune cells that not only kill head and neck tumour cells in mice but also reduce the immune-suppressing myeloid cells...
by Salk Institute A histology image showing inflammation in colon epithelium. Weakening of regulatory T cell function induces infiltration of immune cells (small blue dots) into colon epithelium (blue layer) and causes colitis. Credit: Salk Institute The human immune system is a finely-tuned machine, balancing when to release a cellular army to deal with pathogens,...
by University of California, San Francisco To make new memories, our brain cells first must find one another. Small protrusions that bud out from the ends of neurons’ long, branching tentacles dock neurons together so they can talk. These ports of cellular chatter—called synapses, and found in the trillions throughout the brain—allow us to represent...
by Austrian Academy of Sciences Schematic outline of the study, which used genomic assays (RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, ChIPmentation, flow cytometry) to investigate epigenetic and transcription regulation in structural cells (endothelium, epithelium and fibroblast) from twelve mouse organs. Credit: Thomas Krausgruber / CeMM In a Nature paper, CeMM researchers report on the epigenetic and transcriptional regulation in...
by Osaka University were defined as PD-1+ CD153+ cells in CD4+ T cells. The proportion of senescent T cells in visceral adipose tissues (VAT) of the high fat diet (HFD) control group was significantly increased compared with that in the VAT of the normal diet (ND) control group. CD153-CpG vaccination of HFD mice resulted in...
