Immunology News and Research

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Immunology is the study of the body's immune system.

New genetic condition that raises vulnerability to opportunistic infections

An international consortium co-led by Vanderbilt University Medical Center immunogeneticist Rubén Martínez-Barricarte, PhD, has discovered a new genetic disorder that causes immunodeficiency and profound susceptibility to opportunistic infections including life-threatening fungal pneumonia.

24 Jan 2023

Tumor progression after immunotherapy: Molecular pathways revealed

The University of Michigan’s Rogel Cancer Center researchers discovered a mechanism that explains why a subset of patients’ tumors grows rather than shrink when treated with immunotherapy.

20 Jan 2023

New scalable approach for the diagnosis of multiple respiratory viruses

Cambridge scientists have created a novel test that “fishes” for many respiratory viruses at once using single strands of DNA as “bait” and provides extremely accurate results in under an hour.

18 Jan 2023

Novel blood biomarker predicts a favorable response to CART cell therapy

A MedUni Vienna research group identified a particularly potent biomarker for clinical response to CAR-T cell therapy, establishing the conditions for the most effective use of this innovative therapy for lymphoma treatment.

11 Jan 2023

Key immune alarm protein that regulates inflammation identified

Trinity researchers have made a significant advance in understanding how inflammation is controlled. They recently discovered that a crucial immunological alarm protein that was previously thought to quiet the immune response apparently performs the opposite.

20 Dec 2022

Improving cancer immunotherapies with bioengineered synthetic gene circuits

In two distinct studies, scientists show how synthetic biology can be used to address a challenging problem in cancer immunotherapy: the way immunotherapy-related approaches focused on the short-term killing of tumor cells could fail to eradicate tumors because tumor growth occurs on longer timescales.

19 Dec 2022

Figuring out how immune cells prevent cognitive decline

Could Alzheimer’s disease and other types of cognitive decline be caused by the underproduction of immune cells that are poorly understood? It might, according to a Rutgers study published in Nature Immunology, and increasing these cells could undo the harm.

From Rutgers University 1 Dec 2022

Applying “programmable molecular scissors” to combat COVID-19 infection

As an approach that could be used to create a new class of antiviral drugs, synthetic biology was used by Cambridge scientists to artificially create enzymes programmed to attack the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 and eliminate the virus.

17 Nov 2022

Treatment using CRISPR alleviates swelling attacks in hereditary angioedema patients

Hereditary angioedema (HAE) is a rare, genetic disorder characterized by severe, recurring, and unpredictable swelling attacks in various organs and tissues of the body, which can be painful, debilitating, and life-threatening.

11 Nov 2022

Revitalized immune cells improve waste removal from the brain

Damaged protein clusters in the brain are a hallmark of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and others. Although they have made significant efforts, scientists have only partially succeeded in finding treatments for these conditions by removing these toxic clusters.

11 Nov 2022

Understanding immune cell function to improve vaccine efficacy

The immune system’s capacity to remember defeated disease-causing germs and avoid recurrent infections is still poorly understood, but a new study published in Science Immunology fills in some gaps.

From Rutgers University 8 Nov 2022

The primary functions of innate immune cells

An inflammation and a rise in mucus production are typical signs of allergies and worm infections. The innate immune cells are involved in this immunological response, although it is still unclear exactly what they do.

4 Nov 2022

Different cancers carry distinctive genetic signatures

After analyzing data from a public repository, CD4-T, CD8-T cells, and Treg cells, a team of researchers led by bioinformatics Mabel Vidal from the University of Concepcion and working with researchers from MELISA Institute and other academic institutions discovered a distinctive genetic signature among subsets of infiltrating T cells of various types of cancer.

4 Nov 2022

Genetic timestamping tracks the fate of plasma cells over time

Vaccines function by effectively producing immune cells that live for a long time, frequently for decades. These immune cells form a protective barrier that prevents or reduces re-infection, as well as a memory that enables one to identify an old invader, such as a virus, and eliminate it before it causes disease.

1 Nov 2022

Immunological mechanisms behind the development of alloantibodies

Hemophilia A is the most frequent severe variant of hemophilia. It nearly mostly affects men. The condition is frequently treatable, although not for all patients. A study at the University of Bonn has now highlighted a critical mechanism required for the therapy to be efficient.

28 Oct 2022

New drug to tackle complex cases of UTI

A new drug combination has been shown to be more successful, especially against persistent, drug-resistant infections, according to an international study conducted by a Rutgers Researcher comparing new and older therapies for complex urinary tract infections.

From Rutgers University 28 Oct 2022

Novel method tags proteins from specific cancer cells

Biomarkers are extremely useful tools that enable doctors to research biology and disease by, for instance, diagnosing a disease from a blood or tissue sample, predicting whether a treatment will be beneficial in a person, or determining how much of a drug is entering diseased cells.

28 Oct 2022

Pioneering gene editing approach could lead to new treatments for CTLA-4 insufficiency

A fault in cells that form a key part of the immune system can be repaired with a pioneering gene editing technique, finds new research demonstrated in human cells and mice, led by UCL scientists.

From University College London 27 Oct 2022

Carp virus provides significant insights into immunology

In an article published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, the team led by Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen, a virologist and immunologist at the University of Liège, describes 10 years of research on how a carp virus uses a protein domain called Zalpha (Zα) to inhibit the host cell’s defense mechanisms.

26 Sep 2022

Novel means to prevent and treat gonorrhea

According to scientists from the Georgia State University’s Institute for Biomedical Sciences, producing a mutation that impedes the way the bacterial pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae transmits gonorrhea might provide a novel means to prevent and treat the disease.

26 Sep 2022