In recent years, scientists have been finding new ways to treat cancer outside of the chemotherapy and surgery combination. One technique, called immunotherapy, has showed promising results by reprogramming the patient's immune system to attack tumors. Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle tested a version of immunotherapy on patients who had late-stage leukemia and lymphoma that had exhausted other treatment options—some weren't expected to survive the experiment.
You probably know that your DNA contains the blueprints for every protein your body needs, plus instructions on how to regulate them. But your DNA could also strongly influence your immune system, making you more or less susceptible to bacterial infections, according to a new study led by researchers from Duke University. The study was published this week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
As we age, lots of things don't work as well as they used to. The immune system is one of those things—over time, the body slows its production of pathogen-hunting T cells, making it harder for the body to combat newly-introduced diseases. Now a team led by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine has discovered a hormone that can coax an aging body into producing more T cells, which could keep patients healthier and extend their lifespans. The researchers published their work this week in the journal PNAS.
Though schizophrenia was first recognized more than a century ago, scientists are still not sure what causes it. In recent years, they've discovered more evidence that the immune system may be more involved in the presence of the disease than was previously thought. A new study, published online last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, adds to it—the authors found that people with schizophrenia (and those at highest risk for the disease to set in) may have overactive immune systems working in their brains.
Your immune system is constantly on the lookout for pathogens trying to infiltrate the body and cause disease. In an effort to understand how the immune system knows which ones to attack, a team of researchers discovered a special protein that immune cells use to tag pathogens that other cells later destroy. The study was published yesterday in PNAS.
You probably remember when you had the chicken pox. Maybe you recall a few times you caught the flu. But you might have had some infections that you never even realized or that you don't remember. Even if you don't remember, your immune system does—it has special antibodies to combat those viruses should they ever return. Now researchers have developed a quick, inexpensive method called VirScan that can detect the viruses currently infecting a patient as well as those with which she was infected in the past, all from a tiny sample of blood. VirScan could help researchers better understand how the body combats viruses and virus' lasting effects. The researchers published an article outlining their method today in Science.
