by CORDIS Credit: Anshuman Rath, Shutterstock The membrane attack complex (MAC) is a set of proteins typically formed on the surface of pathogen cell membranes. They punch tiny holes in an invading bacteria’s membrane. The bacteria ultimately dies if enough holes are punched. When an invader is discovered, our immune system produces many MACs. Those...
The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at people taking immunosuppressive medications to treat chronic inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Since a minimum level of antibodies needed for protection hasn’t been established, it has been difficult to say whether the levels achieved by people on immune suppressing drugs are...
by Lauran Neergaard and Matthew Perrone In this Jan. 15, 2021, file photo, Dr. Yomaris Pena, Internal Medicine Physician with Somos Community Care at a COVID-19 extracts the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine out of a vial at a vaccination site at the Corsi Houses in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York. U.S. health regulators have...
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON IMAGE: DIAGRAM EXPLAINING EFFECTS ON TUMOUR CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON New research has identified a potential treatment that could improve the human immune system’s ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells that regulate the...
by Claudia Lopez Lloreda, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Researchers have found sensory nerve fibers (red) that interact with lymph nodes (green) in mice. Credit: Siyi Huang, John Austin, Najat Mannoun The nervous and immune systems have long been thought to be separate entities in the body, but new research has uncovered a direct cellular...
THAYER SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AT DARTMOUTH A MOLECULAR MODEL OF THE F12 BIOTHERAPY SHOWS THE FOLD OF ITS POLYPEPTIDE BACKBONE. RESIDUAL T CELL EPITOPES ARE MAPPED ONTO THE STRUCTURE AND COLORED FROM WHITE (NO EPITOPES). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has prioritized finding effective treatment of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of...
by Jacqueline Carey, University of Illinois at Chicago Macrophages are white blood cells that, depending on the signals they get from the immune system, become specialized in either increasing or decreasing inflammation. When macrophages are programmed to be pro-inflammatory, they help to increase inflammation, which is beneficial for fighting infections; when they are programmed to...
Tumor cells in younger and female patients accumulate cancer-causing mutations that are more poorly presented to the immune system, better enabling tumors to escape detection and clearance UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – SAN DIEGO DUE TO A PROCESS KNOWN AS IMMUNO-EDITING, YOUNGER AND FEMALE PATIENTS WITH CANCER HAVE CANCER-CAUSING GENETIC MUTATIONS THAT ARE LEAST VISIBLE TO...
by American Chemical Society larger the dose of opioid, the larger the antibody response. “This was surprising,” Kyzer says. “We saw antibody responses in people who were taking large doses for as little as 6 months.” The scientists are now working on isolating the key opioid antigenic intermediates in the body that prompt the generation...
by University of Chicago Medical Center The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is shining a bright spotlight on vaccine development. As numerous vaccines race through clinical trials, physicians and researchers continue to work on developing new vaccine technologies to generate the most effective vaccines with the fewest side effects. A new proof-of-concept study by researchers at the...
