Feature Channels: Immunology

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered clues to a particularly deadly form of rejection that can follow lung transplantation. Called antibody-mediated rejection, the condition remains impervious to available treatments and difficult to diagnose. The researchers have identified, in mice, a process that may prevent the condition and lead to possible therapies to treat it.

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Until now, researchers haven’t been able to accurately quantify a latent form of HIV that persists in patients’ immune cells. A new genetic technique is fast and 10 to 100 times more accurate than previous diagnostics.

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New experimental cancer treatments are raising hopes among clinicians and patients for longer survival times and cures. But clinical trials that test such treatments also need to analyze the impact on patients of potentially harsh side effects, known as adverse events. A major new study now underway aims to better incorporate patient feedback into clinical trials that help determine which new cancer treatments will be approved for use.

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During cancer immunotherapy, immune cells often undergo a form of cellular suicide, termed apoptosis, which can limit the therapy’s effectiveness.

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John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack Meridian Health Hackensack University Medical Center announced today that it is leading enrollment worldwide for WIZARD 201G, a global Phase 2 study in glioblastoma (GBM). The trial, sponsored by Boston Biomedical, is evaluating DSP-7888, an investigational cancer vaccine, in combination with bevacizumab for recurrent disease.

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Vanderbilt vaccine researchers are enrolling adult volunteers in a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Phase II clinical trial that will study a next generation pertussis vaccine that may protect people from whooping cough.

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A team at GW Cancer Center is investigating Prussian blue nanoparticles used in combination with checkpoint inhibitors for cancer treatment

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The focus for asthma treatment is often stepping up treatment, but clinicians need to know how to step down therapy when symptoms improve.

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Injection of a genetically modified virus that induces the body’s own immune cells to attack metastatic melanoma effectively treated almost 40 percent of patients with tumors that could not be surgically removed.

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Immune cells called CD4+ T cells could be important mediators of protection against the Zika virus, according to a study published January 24 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Sujan Shresta of the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, and colleagues. The findings support vaccine strategies that induce a protective CD4+ T cell response to the Zika virus.

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Researchers have found that, during acute kidney injury in a mouse model, the kidney-resident macrophages are reprogrammed to a developmental state, resembling these same cells when they are found in newborn mice. This reprogramming may be important to promote healing and tissue regeneration.

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Wistar scientists and collaborators demonstrated the utility of an optimized synthetic DNA vaccine platform for rapidly inducing immunity against unique combinations of tumor neoantigens.

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In an article recently published in JCI Insight, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Vanderbilt University have identified checkpoint inhibitor resistance mechanisms in many solid tumor cancers, including melanoma, lung cancer and breast cancer.

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Older patients with a diagnosis of chronic sinusitis — a disease of the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses that often persists over many years — have a unique inflammatory signature that may render them less responsive to steroid treatment, according to a new study published by Vanderbilt researchers.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow Bette Korber will discuss her work designing a vaccine against HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) in three Frontiers in Science public lectures beginning Jan. 31 in Los Alamos.

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Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered that antibodies that may form the basis of a universal flu vaccine inhibit a second viral protein in addition to the one that they bind. The study, to be published January 25 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, reveals that antibodies that recognize the viral surface protein hemagglutinin can also inhibit the viral neuraminidase, and that this enhances antibody neutralization of the virus and the activation of innate immune cells with anti-viral activity.

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Rutgers researchers have discovered the long-sought reason that many people with joint replacements experience harmful inflammation and bone loss. Their finding, published in Nature Materials, may pave the way for new therapies to reduce pain and prevent the need for follow-up surgery.

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Professor Katerina Akassoglou to receive 2018 Prize for work understanding the origins of nerve damage in MS and identifying potential therapies to stop it.

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Valentine's Day tips for keeping loved ones with allergies and asthma sneeze and wheeze free

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A Ludwig Cancer Research study has uncovered a cellular mechanism by which melanomas that fail to respond to checkpoint blockade may be made susceptible to such immunotherapies. Led by Ping-Chih Ho of the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and reported in the current issue of Nature Immunology, the study also identifies an existing diabetes drug that could be used to accomplish that feat.

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Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania say they’ve identified how to fuel macrophages with the energy needed to attack and eat cancer cells.

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A study by UCLA researchers is the first to demonstrate a technique for coaxing pluripotent stem cells — which can give rise to every cell type in the body and which can be grown indefinitely in the lab — into becoming mature T cells capable of killing tumor cells.

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have tweaked the recipe for coaxing human stem cells into insulin-secreting beta cells and shown that the resulting cells are more responsive to fluctuating glucose levels in the blood.

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Fever is known to help power up our immune cells, and scientists in Shanghai have new evidence explaining how. They found in mice that fever alters surface proteins on immune cells like lymphocytes to make them better able to travel via blood vessels to reach the site of infection. Their work appears on January 15 in the journal Immunity.

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While more than 32 million individuals in the U.S. have a documented penicillin allergy in their medical record, studies have shown that more 95 percent actually can be treated safely with this class of antibiotics, improving treatment outcomes and reducing the risk of infection with dangerous resistant pathogens such as Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). A review article in the January 15 issue of JAMA recommends best practices for evaluation of reported penicillin allergies and provides clinicians with guidance and tools to help determine appropriate procedures based on the severity of previously reported reactions.

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Organ transplant rejection is a major problem in transplantation medicine. Suppressing the immune system to prevent organ rejection, however, opens the door to life-threatening infections. Researchers at the University of Basel's Biozentrum have now discovered a molecular approach preventing rejection of the transplanted graft while simultaneously maintaining the ability to fight against infections.

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The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dragonfly Therapeutics, Inc., today announced a strategic collaboration to bring Dragonfly’s TriNKET™ (tri-specific natural killer cell engager therapy) immunotherapy drug candidates to patients in clinical trials beginning in 2019.

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Herpes viral infections use the ancient genetic material found in the human genome to proliferate, mimicking the same process tumors have been found to manipulate, Mount Sinai researchers have shown for the first time. These observations provide further insight about how herpes viruses can manipulate the immune system in ways that may drive neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, according to the study, published in Nature Communications in January.

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MD Anderson researchers have identified a new potential immunotherapy target in pancreatic cancer, which so far has been notoriously resistant to treatment with immune checkpoint blockade drugs effective against a variety of other cancers.

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A landmark study has found that a newer targeted drug is significantly more effective than standard therapy for treating elderly patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The drug, ibrutinib, attacks cancer cells without damaging normal cells, thus causing fewer side effects.

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UCLA researchers led by Dr. Donald Kohn have created a method for modifying blood stem cells to reverse the genetic mutation that causes a life-threatening autoimmune syndrome called IPEX.

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Berkeley scientists have turned CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology into a synthetic immune response. Their engineered "ProCas9" is safely turned off until a plant or animal virus infects the cell. ProCas9 can be programmed to initiate an immune reaction in response to specific viral threats, like Zika and West Nile.

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New research from Johns Hopkins Medicine and Sheppard Pratt Health System shows that people in the study with schizophrenia also have higher levels of antibodies against the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a herpes virus that causes infectious mononucleosis, so-called mono.

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A Rutgers infectious disease expert explains this year’s outbreak and how you can protect yourself

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Summaries of recent Fred Hutch research, with links for additional background and media contacts.

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MSU scientists have discovered SLAMF7, an immune receptor, has the ability to tone down the body’s immune response when activated on certain white blood cells. Yet, for certain HIV patients who experience a myriad of health issues, the researchers found that these patients’ receptors don’t work properly.

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By pairing a novel personalized cancer vaccine with a more established immunotherapy drug that is administered to patients in an innovative fashion, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are testing a first-of-its-kind strategy aimed at improving outcomes for kidney cancer patients who are at high risk of recurrence following surgery.

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Diabetes is caused by damaged or non-existing insulin cells inability to produce insulin, a hormone that is necessary in regulating blood sugar levels. Many diabetes patients take insulin supplements to regulate these levels.

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Survey data suggest at least 1 in 10 U.S. adults are food allergic and nearly 1 in 5 believe they have a food allergy. Food allergies are expensive and potentially life-threatening conditions.

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Myths about gluten are hard to bust. Intolerance, allergy, sensitivity, hypersensitivity. What is what? Celiac disease is none of these things. It is an autoimmune disorder, where gluten triggers the immune system to attack the gut. It is common, lifelong, and can seriously harm health - but nobody knows for sure what causes it. Now a review in Frontiers in Pediatrics says a common food additive could both cause and trigger these autoimmune attacks, and calls for warnings on food labels pending further tests.

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The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Valery Krizhanovsky and Dr. Yossi Ovadya have found a way to get the body to clear out senescent cells, which are involved in a number of age-related diseases. Treated mice showed improved blood and activity tests, younger-looking tissues, and lived longer than their untreated counterparts.

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Experts and research on important topics in the healthcare system

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Some dermal fibroblasts can convert into fat cells that reside under the dermis, giving skin a youthful look and producing peptides that fight infections. University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers and colleagues show how this happens and what causes it to stop as people age.

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Researchers at Cornell – led by Iwijn De Vlaminck, assistant professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering – have come up with an elegant, low-cost method that solves that problem. And not only does it push single-cell genomics forward, it may allow for new avenues for studies of infection and immune biology.

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In a new study by Yale Cancer Center (YCC), scientists suggest that as the number of clinical trials in cancer immunotherapy grows exponentially, some caution should be exercised as we continue to better understand the biology of these new therapeutic targets.

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Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), a nonprofit organization leading the fight to end Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), has awarded a $329,000 grant to Kanneboyina Nagaraju, professor and chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and his team at Binghamton University’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Nagaraju will continue his work examining the body’s immune response to the production of new dystrophin protein resulting from exon skipping and gene therapy treatments.

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In a report published in Nature, however, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have shown that a personalized ‘neoantigen’ vaccine can spur a response against glioblastoma, with immune T-cells generated by the vaccine migrating into the brain tumor, creating a ‘hotter,’ inflamed environment around the cancer cells.

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La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and Kyowa Kirin Pharmaceutical Research, Inc. (KKR), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd. (KHK), a global specialty pharmaceutical company, today announced the signing of a new agreement. The agreement extends the longest industry-academic collaboration in the world for another three-year term, through until the end of 2021.

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A focus on high-risk tuberculosis patients may be the answer to stalled progress in stamping out the illness in the United States.

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Researchers analyzed data from more than 1,000 breast cancer patients and found that breast cancer behaves differently than other cancers that are currently treated with immunotherapy. They identified seven clusters of breast cancer patients based on the immune evasion mechanisms that breast cancer uses to avoid detection.