Category: Blog
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Searching Salmonella infections for a cancer cure
Picture source: Science News The cure for cancer has been used as a talking point for decades. Even the current US president, Joe Biden, promised to cure cancer during his campaign. We certainly don’t need to convince anyone that studying anticancer therapies is an important research topic. According to the CDC, in the United States…
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Are CAR Tregs a reason for CAR therapy failure?
Created with Biorender.com On 12th of September 2022, Zinaida Good, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, tweeted: “We found a CAR Treg subset in CD19-CAR T cells for lymphoma. We hope that this finding will put us on a path from 40% cure to 100% cure”.Only five years earlier, FDA had made historical approval for…
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Silica particles vs. the immune system
Let’s cover a topic that is rarely discussed in immunology – Silicosis. Have you ever imagined what happens when you breathe in silica? Silica particles cause a severe condition called silicosis. As Ganesan et al. explain that silicosis is a fibrotic lung disease caused by the inhalation of respirable silica particles. Where can we be…
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The biomechanics of lymph node swelling
At times when we fall sick, barely noticeable lumps can be felt under our skin. These lumps are our swollen lymph nodes, and they indicate the body’s immune system reacting to infectious agents. Historically, while we were trying to figure out the immune system and its fundamental cellular components, the complexity and dynamicity of lymph…
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Another Novel Zoonotic Virus: The Langya henipavirus!
Picture source: CDC Recent reports from the eastern region of China in the New England Journal of Medicine mentioned 35 patients showing feverish symptoms, infected with a novel zoonotic virus (virus of animal origin that can infect humans). The virus, Langya henipavirus (LayV), was named after the town “Langya“ where the first patient infected with…
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A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Mimicking Tumor with Probiotic
Created using BioRender.com Take a look in the mirror. What do you see? Given that you are reading an immunology blog, I hope your answer would be something along the line of a human being, or Homo sapiens if you want to be fancy. Now, let’s take a closer look together! At the genetic level,…
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Novel role of immune cells in hair growth
We normally lose from 50 to 100 hairs every day. Whether we notice it or not, lost hair is replaced with newly growing ones all the time. So far, we know of several factors that can disrupt this balance and lead to significant hair loss; including heredity, hormonal changes, infectious agents, medications (for instance drugs…
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The One where he Receives a Pig’s Heart
Throughout history, people have experimented with transplantation and transfusion. Until the discovery of Human Leukocyte Antigen, blood groups, and tissue typing – donors commonly consisted of animals. My favorite one was using lamb blood because of religious aspects (Lamb of God), although it did not work as often. Expected, right? However, today with genetic modification…
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On the Cutting Edge: The OMICS Generation
The last two decades have seen rapid development in almost every aspect of human life, and the field of biomedicine is no different. By the time the Human Genome Project concluded, the field of genomics had already observed a steady drop in the cost of sequencing. In years that followed, the technology developed rapidly, and…
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Mutation in innate immune receptor can cause lupus
You stash your drugs in a lupus textbook (Dr. Foreman) It’s never lupus (Dr. House) From House MD But today it is! I assume that Hugh Laurie’s character would have loved the recent work of Brown and colleagues published in Nature. Dr House had diagnosed lupus only once within eight seasons of the series, and…
Antibuddies 