Feature Channels: Immunology

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A combination of radiotherapy followed by immunotherapy is a promising strategy for the treatment of oral malignant melanomas in dogs.

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A laboratory at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) has been issued a major grant to repurpose drugs to combat non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), an emerging family of germs naturally found in soil and water and which can be deadly to those with compromised immune systems and pre-existing lung diseases.

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The American Association of Immunologists (AAI), Inc., announced today it has been recognized by ASAE with its highest honor for excellence in association communications: the 2023 Gold Circle Awards Overall Excellence Winner.

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A team led by researchers at Harvard Medical School has developed a new tool that promises to improve the way pathologists see and evaluate a tumor by providing detailed clues about the cancer.

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As men age, some of their cells lose the very thing that makes them biological males—the Y chromosome—and this loss hampers the body’s ability to fight cancer, according to new research from Cedars-Sinai Cancer.

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Researchers in New York and Texas have identified that female marmosets are more likely to transmit the Zika virus during pregnancy if they have been previously infected by a different virus, dengue.

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PHILADELPHIA — (June 20, 2023) — When cancer that starts in the body metastasizes to the brain, it is almost always lethal, in part because so few treatment options exist. Now a new study by Wistar scientists published in Nature Communications shows that a type of brain cell called astrocytes plays an important role in promoting brain metastasis by recruiting a specific subpopulation of immune cells.

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Cedars-Sinai investigators have identified several steps in a cellular process responsible for triggering one of the body’s important inflammatory responses. Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Immunology, open up possibilities for modulating the type of inflammation associated with several infections and inflammatory diseases.

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New research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigations confirms that microglial cells – which are specialized immune cells with a decade-long lifespan in the brain - can serve as a stable viral reservoir for latent HIV.

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A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison offers a first-of-its-kind visual of a non-mammal species' adaptive immune system in action. The advance holds potential implications for a range of scientific aims, from improving wildlife vaccines to better understanding fundamental disease processes and possibly the evolution of adaptive immunity itself.

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Wistar is pleased to welcome Sozi Tulante to its Board of Trustees. He is currently General Counsel of Form Energy, a Massachusetts-based energy storage technology and manufacturing company.

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Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have engineered stable, universal MHC-I molecules that can be produced rapidly at scale, allowing researchers not only to develop vaccines and immunotherapies more quickly but also to identify molecules that can work broadly across the population. The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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CD8+ T cells, a vital component of the immune system that provides immunity against cancer, have been the focal point of anti-cancer therapies.

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Vitiligo is a disease that causes the skin to lose its natural color, resulting in light or white patches of skin. This condition, which affects people of all ages and ethnicities, not only affects patients’ skin, but also can cause low self-esteem and depression, and be associated with other medical conditions.

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Howard Colman, MD, PhD, was recently featured as an author on a publication in Nature Medicine describing the results of a recent clinical trial – a breakthrough in glioblastoma treatment with the help of a modified cold virus injected directly into the tumor. When combined with an immunotherapy drug, the authors observed a subset of patients that appeared to be living longer as a result of this therapy.

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Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine’s International Center for the Advancement of Translational Science and the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases have developed a new approach for the detailed evaluation of HIV infection throughout the entire male genital tract, HIV acquisition via the penis and the efficient prevention of penile HIV infection. The study was published in mBio by the American Society of Microbiology.

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Researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute have succeeded in generating the lung’s most important immune cell, the alveolar macrophage, in the lab.

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An overactive inflammatory response could be at the root of many long COVID cases, according to a new study from the Allen Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

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The American Association of Immunologists Appoints Gail A. Bishop as Incoming Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Immunology

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Stella Hoft, a M.D./Ph.D. student at Saint Louis University’s School of Medicine, was recently awarded a F30 Grant through the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases.

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Biologists have identified a previously unknown way that our immune system detects viruses. The immune protein CARD8 acts as a trip wire to detect a range of viruses, including the virus that causes COVID. They also found that CARD8 functions differently among species and varies between humans.

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A team of scientists from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) in collaboration with the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) has discovered that IL-17 protein plays a central role in skin ageing. The study, which was led by Dr. Guiomar Solanas, Dr. Salvador Aznar Benitah, both at IRB Barcelona, ​​and Dr. Holger Heyn, at CNAG, highlights an IL-17-mediated ageing process to an inflammatory state.

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A research consortium, including a Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine neuroscientist and his research coordinator, are calling for a consensus on how scientists identify and evaluate how infections contribute to or cause cognitive impairment and dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease.

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The Cancer Research Institute is honoring Dr. Tak Mak with the prestigious 2023 William B. Coley Award.

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A new study has uncovered evidence of a “coupling” mechanism between the malaria parasite and its human host, which could one day lead to new treatments for a disease that claims the life of a child under age 5 every minute.

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New Olin Business School research demonstrates the effectiveness of partisan cues in a COVID-19 vaccination video ad campaign.A large-scale study to see if politically partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines found that, yes, they can.

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A successful long-term experiment with live hogs indicates Nebraska scientists may be another step closer to achieving a safe, long-lasting and potentially universal vaccine against swine flu.

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Therapeutic nanocarriers engineered from adult skin cells can curb inflammation and tissue injury in damaged mouse lungs, new research shows, hinting at the promise of a treatment for lungs severely injured by infection or trauma.

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Research has shown that the immune system doesn’t function properly in patients with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that occurs when plasma cells — a type of white blood cell — multiply out of control. But a clinical trial led by Jens Hillengass, MD, PhD, Chief of Myeloma at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, shows that exercise may have the power to strengthen the immune system in those patients, providing a non-pharmaceutical method of helping control the disease.

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A new study from researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys and Eli Lilly and Company describes the science behind an autoimmune disease treatment in a Phase 2 clinical trial.

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Patients with early relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma had significantly improved overall survival when treated with the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel) when compared to the current standard-of-care chemoimmunotherapy, according to results of the Phase III ZUMA-7 trial reported by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

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In a new study of trastuzumab deruxtecan, a HER2-targeted antibody drug conjugate, researchers observed encouraging responses and long-lasting clinical benefit in several tumor types. These data from an interim analysis of the Phase II DESTINY-PanTumor02 study, led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, were presented today at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

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An MD Anderson-led Phase II trial showed the HER2-targeted therapy zanidatamab demonstrated durable responses in patients with advanced HER2-positive biliary tract cancer. The data were presented at the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting.

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According to the federal government’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, nearly 3 million people worldwide — with almost a third in the United States — are living with multiple sclerosis (MS), a disabling neurological disease in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks nerves feeding information to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Although rarely fatal, MS can lead to long-term disabilities, and impair movement, muscle control, vision and cognition.

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Multiple sclerosis has traditionally been considered a condition that predominantly affects white people of European ancestry. However, a new analysis conducted by a North American team led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers suggests that the debilitating neurological condition is more prevalent in Black Americans than once thought. It is also far more prevalent in Northern regions of the country including New England, the Dakotas, and the Pacific Northwest.

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AAI has been recognized with a 2023 ASAE Gold Circle Award

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New research suggests that the immune system’s ability to respond to spinal cord injuries diminishes with age – and identifies potential avenues to improve that response and help patients heal.

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Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital found key “on” switch, NLRP12, for innate immune cell death in diseases that cause red blood cells to rupture, which can lead to inflammation and multi-organ failure.

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Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology show that T cells can recognize several different viral targets, called "antigens," shared between most coronaviruses, including common cold coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2. They also looked more in-depth at what fragments of these antigens, called “epitopes,” are recognized and how conserved they are across different coronaviruses.