Tag: immune system

December 14, 2023

Adding carrot juice to your daily nutrition routine could help promote better health. A small study published in the journal Nutrients this month found that drinking carrot juice could help boost the immune system and reduce inflammation. Researchers from the […]

March 3, 2023

As confirmed in a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, Americans now face the worst health outcomes of all developed countries. The US also has the highest healthcare spending among these high-income nations, both per person and as GDP share. […]

October 20, 2022

Centuries after the Black Death ravaged the medieval world, the genetic legacy of the disease still affects people to this day, according to a new study. The genes that may have helped individuals survive the Bubonic Plague during the 14th […]

July 6, 2022

The current wave of COVID-19 highlights a particularly high risk of reinfection by the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Why is this? A team from the Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and of the Geneva […]

June 7, 2022

New insights into how genetic factors affect the body’s immune response in type 1 diabetes have been published in eLife. The findings provide evidence of a direct link between genetic factors associated with susceptibility to type 1 diabetes and immune […]

May 27, 2022

T cells, biology textbooks teach us, are the soldiers of the immune system, constantly on the ready to respond to a variety of threats, from viruses to tumors. However, without rest and maintenance T cells can die and leave their […]

May 23, 2022

Primary immunodeficiency disorders (PID) can result in chronic and sometimes life-threatening infections. More than 450 PIDs have been described, but timely and accurate diagnoses remain a challenge. In a new study in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, […]

May 13, 2022

Patients prescribed antibiotics in hospital are more likely to get fungal infections because of disruption to the immune system in the gut, according to a new study from the University of Birmingham and National Institutes of Health. Using immune-boosting drugs […]

April 27, 2022

The immune system remembers. Often this memory, primed by past encounters with threats like bacteria or viruses, is an asset. But when that memory is sparked by internal drivers, like chronic inflammation, it can prove detrimental, perpetuating a misguided immune […]

April 19, 2022

Checkpoint inhibitors have become important tools in the cancer-fighting arsenal. By blocking proteins that normally restrain the immune response, these drugs can help the immune system destroy cancer cells. But they don’t work in all patients. And now a new […]

April 11, 2022

A new study, led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, identifies a reason for why older adults are significantly more susceptible to infectious diseases than younger people, a critical societal issue most recently exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. […]

March 16, 2022

The first FDA-approved gene therapies are living drugs: immune cells taken from cancer patients engineered to target tumor cells. However, for many patients, these advanced therapies do not result in a long-lasting remission. Now, scientists at the New York Genome […]

March 15, 2022

To quote veteran science writer Ed Yong’s simple yet extremely accurate words in The Atlantic, “The immune system is very complicated.” As the COVID-19 pandemic had made abundantly clear, science still doesn’t fully understand the sophisticated defense mechanisms that protect […]

February 16, 2022

Using powerful tools and techniques developed in the field of structural biology, researchers at the University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute have discovered new details about the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. The findings bring into focus the basic […]

February 8, 2022

Previous studies have shown how fasting can influence the immune system to improve different chronic inflammatory conditions, but little is known about how immune responses might determine a healthy metabolism. Since the liver is a central hub and regulator of […]

January 13, 2022

The human immune system, that marvel of complexity, subtlety, and sophistication, includes a billion-year-old family of proteins used by bacteria to defend themselves against viruses, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and in Israel have discovered. The findings, published online today […]

January 12, 2022

Long before the onset of dementia, there is evidence for increased activity of the brain’s immune system. Researchers from DZNE and the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) come to this conclusion based on a study of more than 1,000 older adults. […]

December 16, 2021

Experts in Japan have identified a fundamental part of the immune system’s long-term memory, providing a useful new detail in the pursuit to design better vaccines for diseases, ranging from COVID-19 to malaria. The research, published in the Journal of […]

November 17, 2021

A large, nationwide study of COVID-19 cases led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that people taking medications that suppress the immune system — for example, to prevent transplant rejection or to treat […]

October 14, 2021

Cambridge researchers have discovered how T cells — an important component of our immune system — are able keep on killing as they hunt down and kill cancer cells, repeatedly reloading their toxic weapons. Cytotoxic T cells are specialist white […]