For several decades, researchers have sought to identify biomarkers capable of accurately predicting the outcome of an infection with a high-risk oncogenic HPV type. Despite significant advances, no viral, immune-related or molecular marker can currently and reliably predict which infections will regress spontaneously and which will progress to more severe disease.
A team led by Harvard Medical School researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has developed a faster way to identify and engineer cancer-fighting therapies.
Researchers at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center used a CRISPR screen to identify a key molecular pathway that drives exhaustion in cancer-fighting immune cells, limiting their ability to keep tumors under control.
Thousands of heart patients could be treated without having a metal stent permanently implanted in their arteries—according to research from the University of East Anglia (UEA). A major analysis of more than 7,800 patients found that a newer treatment using drug-coated balloons performed just as well as conventional stents at preventing heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths.
One of the main ways that the APOE4 gene variant, the biggest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, undermines brain circuit function is by disrupting the process of insulating neurons with a fatty sheath that optimizes their electrical transmission.
One of the great challenges in treating diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is not necessarily finding a promising drug. It is getting the drug to the right place.
Researchers have uncovered a previously overlooked immune cell that can recognize and kill small cell lung cancer, the most aggressive form of the disease globally. Published in Cancer Cell, the WEHI study found patients with higher levels of these cells lived longer, uncovering a hidden immune defense that could be exploited to attack these hard-to-treat tumors.
By filming skin stem cells in living mice over five months, researchers at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, have discovered that in females these cells renew the skin in a more coordinated way than in males. This difference, controlled by sex hormones, goes hand in hand with faster wound healing in female mice. This research could eventually pave the way for personalized treatments taking into account patients’ sex.
Opioid painkillers are some of the strongest analgesic medicines, but they are also the riskiest owing to a range of side effects, including addiction. An experimental opioid painkiller designed to be reversibly switched on and off with different light frequencies, keeping its action local and out of the brain, may eliminate the dangerous side effects of current opioids, according to a study led by Weill Cornell Medicine and University of Pennsylvania investigators. The findings herald a broad new approach for targeting medicines more precisely and effectively.
A new approach can program these cells inside the body and shows promise against diseases caused by dysfunctional T cells, including lymphoma and autoimmune hepatitis.