For patients battling neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other dementias, delivering disease-fighting antibody drugs directly to the brain has proven to be a difficult task. Our bodies set up tight walls to prevent infections from spreading to the brain, where they often become fatal.
Tumors possess myriad mechanisms to ensure their survival even at the peril of the host. Now scientists are delving deeper into how cancer cells alter the metabolism of specific amino acids to support the malignancy’s growth while simultaneously evading the antitumor activity of the host’s immune system.
Exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals may leave molecular changes that could someday help identify people at higher risk of breast cancer
A new computational approach reveals how cells communicate to assemble into tissues. This could accelerate stem cell engineering, improve disease models, and inform therapies.
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.