Immunology News and Research

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

Cancer therapies improved by changing an antibody’s binding to a target

Before World Cancer Day (4th February), new research from the Centre for Cancer Immunology at the University of Southampton has demonstrated that altering how firmly an antibody attaches to a target can enhance cancer treatments.

2 Feb 2023

Clinically approved fungal vaccine protects against fungal infections

A new vaccine developed by the University of Georgia might be the first clinically approved immunization to safeguard against invasive fungal infections, which are becoming more common as antifungal drug resistance grows.

From University of Georgia 1 Feb 2023

UNC research describes another layer to the challenge of HIV latency

When people living with HIV take antiviral therapy (ART), their viral loads are driven so low that a standard blood test cannot detect the virus.

1 Feb 2023

Research supports the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination in cancer patients receiving immunotherapy

Research findings published in Frontiers in Immunology show that cancer immunotherapy does not interfere with COVID-19 immunity in previously vaccinated patients.

1 Feb 2023

Exploring how smoking cannabis alters the oral microbiome and its impact on the brain

Inspiration strikes when you least expect it. For Wei Jiang, M.D., a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), inspiration came in 2018 on a smoke-filled boat tour around Amsterdam during an international conference.

30 Jan 2023

Experts urge to recognize the need for more rational discourse around the future of virology

The study of viruses is under renewed scrutiny, say more than 150 experts in a new commentary published today in mSphere, mBio and the Journal of Virology, journals of the American Society for Microbiology.

27 Jan 2023

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