Feature Channels: Immunology

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Researchers describe the role of a transcription factor called TCF-1 in targeting the condensed chromatin and regulating the availability of genome sequences in T-cell development. The new connection between TCF-1 and chromatin will aid in developing new therapies using epigenetic drugs to alter T-cell fate in cancer, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases.

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Researchers engineered mice in which the damage caused by a mutant human TDP-43 protein could be reversed by one type of brain immune cell. TDP-43 is a protein that misfolds and accumulates in the motor areas of the brains of ALS patients. They found that microglia, the first and primary immune response cells in the brain and spinal cord, are essential for dealing with TDP-43-associated neuron death.

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Researchers from the University of Chicago, Harvard University and others show that poor immune responses, not egg adaptions, may explain the low effectiveness of the vaccine that year.

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Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease driven by the interplay of genetics, environmental factors and a diverse cast of immune cells. In their latest study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology (LJI) identified a subset of T cells, whose frequency serves as early childhood immune signature that predicts the risk of developing asthma later on.

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New prevention and treatment approaches can reduce serious health risks due to peanut allergy in children, according to an article in the March issue of The Nurse Practitioner, published by Wolters Kluwer.

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With this year’s severe flu season, one statistic is especially chilling. Each year, around 50 percent of all children under 5 years old who die from the flu were previously healthy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Adults who die from the flu, on the other hand, typically had a medical condition that increased their risk of mortality. A new study published in the Journal of Immunology offers new insights as to why healthy children are much more vulnerable. It also opens new opportunities for treatment.

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New guidelines developed collaboratively by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) offer clinicians much needed recommendations for assessment and management of side effects related to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

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Research in mice pinpoints immune mechanism behind tissue damage and complications of chlamydia infection, the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States. Separate immune mechanisms drive bacterial clearance versus immune-mediated tissue damage and subsequent disease. Therapies are needed to avert irreversible reproductive organ damage that can arise as a result of silent infections that go untreated.

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LJI researchers report mechanisms used by a subgroup of ILCs, known as ILC2 cells, to undergo maturation required for them to mount an effective immune response. These discoveries suggest a novel approach to treat inflammatory disease caused by overactive ILC2s.

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Analysis of a clinical trial, RTOG Foundation 3504, finds that nivolumab immunotherapy can be administered safely in conjunction with radiation therapy and chemotherapy for patients with newly diagnosed local-regionally advanced head and neck cancers.

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Analysis of the phase II CONDOR trial indicates that the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab is tolerable among heavily pre-treated patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer and has the potential to slow growth in tumors with low or negative expression of the PD-L1 protein.

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A common cold virus engineered to attack the most common and deadly of brain tumors allowed 20 percent of patients with recurrent glioblastoma to live for three years or longer, researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report on a phase I clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

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ROCHESTER, Minn. — Encephalitis caused by the immune system attacking the brain is similar in frequency to encephalitis from infections, Mayo Clinic researchers report in Annals of Neurology.

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Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a highly aggressive, relapse-prone cancer that accounts for one-fourth of all breast cancers, could be the focus of a new area of study for immune checkpoint blockade therapy. A team of researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed that in TNBC a cell process called glycosylation is required for PD-L1/PD1 molecules to interact and identified exactly how and why glycosylation is so crucial.

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Combining an anti-angiogenesis agent, which blocks blood vessel formation, with an immunotherapy agent, was found to have promising anti-tumor activity and no unexpected side effects in an early-phase clinical trial in patients with advanced kidney cancer.

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While cancer treatment advances are being made in precision medicine and immunotherapy, a unique combination of traditional therapies can also provide some patients benefit. A Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey expert shares more about an approach combining cytoreductive surgery and hyperthermic chemotherapy for cancers that have spread to the abdominal cavity.

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In an effort to combat new HIV infections among men who inject drugs in Vietnam, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted the first study to explore how this population mixes together. Their results were published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

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A novel antibody-based therapy that blocks the excessive formation of collagen clusters is safe and effective in multiple animal models of fibrotic disease

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Scientists at University of Utah Health believe they identified a mechanism that activates T cells, a key component of the immune system, which could explain the elusive link between a tick bite and persistent Lyme arthritis. The results are published online in the February 5th issue of The Journal of Immunology.

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After years of investigation, researchers at Johns Hopkins, the University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have discovered how the immune system might protect a person from recurrent bacterial skin infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus (staph).

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Late breaking abstracts

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Clinical application of cancer fighting nanovaccines has been hampered by complications in large-scale manufacturing, quality control, and safety. Biomedical engineers developed nanovaccines that bind to the albumin protein naturally present in the body. The albumin protein then delivers these nanocomplexes to the lymph nodes, resulting in potent immune activation against multiple tumor types in mouse cancer models. The use of natural albumin as a universal vaccine shuttle is a significant step towards the application of cancer nanovaccine immunotherapy in humans.

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The University of Alabama at Birmingham's 1917 Clinic celebrates 30 years of treatment for those living with HIV. In it's first year, the clinic saw just 100 people but three decades later, the clinic has served more than 12,000 patients. The need for care has enabled the 1917 Clinic to be the largest HIV medical provider in the state, as well as a national leader in care.

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New drugs that activate the immune system to target cancer cells have improved the lives of many patients with cancer. However, immunotherapies are not effective in all patients, and the success of these therapies depends on individual patient factors. A team of Moffitt Cancer Center researchers is trying to find new ways to further enhance the activity of the immune system against cancer. In an article published in the January issue of Cancer Cell, the researchers describe how a new type of immunotherapy drug targeting the protein TIM-3 works to stimulate the immune system.

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Scientists discovered how a gene mutation affects T cell function to promote immune disorders and then tested a treatment based on the discovery—successfully fixing donated immune cells from a 16-year-old boy with an abnormally low level of white blood cells called lymphopenia. Researchers report their findings Jan. 30 in Nature Communications

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A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal Pediatric Blood Cancers lays the scientific groundwork for the use of PD-1 inhibitors with an aggressive form of brain cancer, namely supratentorial pediatric ependymoma.

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The Weizmann Institute of Science's Prof. Rotem Sorek has conducted a systematic study that uncovered multiple new and unusual bacterial immune defense mechanisms which could pave the way toward new biotech tools

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A newly discovered family of viruses appears to play a major role in killing marine bacteria and maintaining the ocean’s ecology. Preliminary evidence suggests that related bacterial viruses also occur in the human gut. The study, by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was published online today in the journal Nature.

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A new position paper by the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology provides guidance to allergists interested in providing telemedicine care to their patients.

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Researchers have developed a universal vaccine to combat influenza A viruses that produces long-lasting immunity in mice and protects them against the limitations of seasonal flu vaccines, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

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La Jolla Institute Professor Dr. Alessandro Sette has been awarded a $340,000 grant by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) to follow up on an earlier MJFF-supported study, which provided the strongest evidence to date that autoimmunity plays a role in Parkinson’s disease.

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Researchers at The Ohio State University and their colleagues have demonstrated how rising temperatures and acidification combine to destabilize different populations of coral microbes—that is, unbalance the natural coral “microbiome."

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La Jolla Institute scientists provide new insights into how so-called CD4 cytotoxic T cells arise in humans and thus could facilitate improved vaccine design.

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A research team at GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences found that latent HIV reservoirs exhibit resistance to elimination by CD8+ T-cells of people living with the virus.

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A new original research article in SLAS Discovery presents a fast, sensitive, and robust methodology for screening small molecule inhibitors against CD73/Ecto-5’-Nucleotidase, a promising target for developing anti-cancer drugs.

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In a study published today in the scientific journal Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Kaufman and Curtis Brandt, a fellow professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at UW-Madison, showed an improved tactic for delivering new genes into the eye's fluid drain, called the trabecular meshwork. It could lead to a treatment for glaucoma.

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New research finds that PDL-1 expressed in antigen presenting cells – macrophages and dendritic cells found in the tumor microenvironment and in the nearby lymph nodes -- is a better indicator than PDL-1 in the tumor of who will respond to immunotherapy drugs.

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People who survive brain infection with West Nile virus can have neurological problems long after the virus is gone. A new study in mice suggests that such ongoing problems may be due to unresolved inflammation that hinders the brain's ability to repair damaged neurons and grow new ones. Reducing inflammation with an arthritis drug protected mice from West Nile-induced memory loss.

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A research team at the Duke Cancer Institute has found a new way to keep the immune system engaged, and is planning to test the approach in a phase 1 clinical trial.

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Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a new therapeutic target for the treatment of melanoma. For decades, research has associated female sex and a history of previous pregnancy with better outcomes after a melanoma diagnosis. Now, a research team from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania says it may have determined the reason for the melanoma-protective effect.

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A team of researchers has developed an ultrasound-based system that can non-invasively and remotely control genetic processes in live immune T cells so that they recognize and kill cancer cells.

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The field of immunotherapy – the harnessing of patients’ own immune systems to fend off cancer – is revolutionizing cancer treatment today. However, clinical trials often show marked improvements in only small subsets of patients, suggesting that as-yet unidentified variations among tumors result in distinct paths of disease progression and response to therapy.

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In the January 12, 2017 Scientific Reports, a research team describes early tests of a minimally-invasive way to assess myelin damage—the hallmark of multiple sclerosis—using positron emission tomography (PET). This approach could be used to follow MS lesions over time.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues across the country and around the world, have used whole genome analyses and chemogenetics to identify new drug targets and resistance genes in 262 parasite cell lines of Plasmodium falciparum — protozoan pathogens that cause malaria — that are resistant to 37 diverse antimalarial compounds.

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Canadian researchers’ innovative work promises to make vaccines more effective against tuberculosis and other infectious diseases like the flu.

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Desmoplastic melanoma is a rare subtype of melanoma that is commonly found on sun-exposed areas, such as the head and neck, and usually seen in older patients. Treatment is difficult because these tumors are often resistant to chemotherapy and lack actionable mutations commonly found in other types of melanoma that are targeted by specific drugs. However, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers report in the Jan. 10 issue of Nature that patients with desmoplastic melanoma are more responsive to immune-activating anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapies than previously assumed.