During pregnancy, immune educator cells teach the mother’s immune system to recognize the developing fetus as part of her “self,” protecting it from being attacked as something “other,” according to our new study published in Science Immunology. The immune system normally protects the body from such invaders as infections and…
Like priming a pump, cells damaged by chronic lung disease can result in severe COVID
The results of a study by an international scientific team co-led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest that—like pouring water atop a wellhead before pumping—the airway cells of patients with chronic lung diseases are “primed” for infection by the COVID-19 virus, resulting…
‘Zombie cells’ hold clues to spinal cord injury repair
Mammals have a poor ability to recover after a spinal cord injury, which can result in paralysis. A main reason for this is the formation of a complex scar associated with chronic inflammation that produces a cellular microenvironment blocking tissue repair. Now, a research team led by Leonor Saude, group…
Study of T cells from COVID-19 convalescents guides vaccine strategies
A KAIST immunology research team found that most convalescent patients of COVID-19 develop and maintain T cell memory for over 10 months regardless of the severity of their symptoms. In addition, memory T cells proliferate rapidly after encountering their cognate antigen and accomplish their multifunctional roles. This study provides new…
How pancreatic cancer cells dodge drug treatments
Cancer cells can become resistant to treatments through adaptation, making them notoriously tricky to defeat and highly lethal. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Cancer Center Director David Tuveson and his team investigated the basis of “adaptive resistance” common to pancreatic cancer. They discovered one of the backups to which these…
Treatment Options for Sickle Cell Disease
Routine treatments for sickle cell disease (SCD) are currently limited to blood, stem cell, and bone marrow transplants though other treatment and management strategies are available to help manage anemia and painful episodes amongst other complications with even more promising drugs and treatments being developed currently and in the near…
Pinpointing how cancer cells turn aggressive
It’s often cancer’s spread, not the original tumor, that poses the disease’s most deadly risk. “And yet metastasis is one of the most poorly understood aspects of cancer biology,” says Kamen Simeonov, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In a new study, a team…
Deficient immune cells implicated in TB disease progression
Nearly a quarter of the world’s population is estimated to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, but less than 15 percent of infected individuals develop the disease. A study published May 24 in Nature Immunology by investigators from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital,…
Researchers reveal aging signatures across diverse tissue cells in mice
Researchers have identified molecular signatures of the aging process in mice, publishing their results today in the open-access eLife journal. Their analyses provide one of the most comprehensive characterisations of the molecular signatures of aging across diverse types of cells from different tissues in a mammal, and will aid future…
Huntington’s disease driven by slowed protein-building machinery in cells
In 1993, scientists discovered that a single mutated gene, HTT, caused Huntington’s disease, raising high hopes for a quick cure. Yet today, there’s still no approved treatment. One difficulty has been a limited understanding of how the mutant huntingtin protein sets off brain cell death, says neuroscientist Srinivasa Subramaniam, Ph.D.,…
Reactivating aging stem cells in the brain
As people get older, their neural stem cells lose the ability to proliferate and produce new neurons, leading to a decline in memory function. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now discovered a mechanism linked to stem cell aging—and how the production of neurons can be reactivated. The stem…