Calgary, AB – Researchers at the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine are using an innovative new imaging technique to study how white blood cells (called neutrophils) respond to inflammation, and have revealed new targets to inhibit the respon…
A research team from the University of British Columbia and the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) at BC Children’s Hospital has identified the role of a type of T cell in type 1 diabetes that may lead to new treatment options for young patien…
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have identified a new pathway that helps control the immune balance through reciprocal regulation of specialized T lymphocytes, which play very different inflammatory roles.
Investigators also deter…
An antibiotic appears to be a safe treatment for stroke and a good companion therapy for tPA, the clot buster that is currently the only FDA-approved drug therapy, researchers report.
A safety study in 60 stroke patients in Georgia, Kentucky a…
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Cigarette smoke shuts off a key enzyme in airways that regulates the body’s response to inflammation, according to findings from the University of Alabama at Birmingham published online today at Science Express.
The UAB rese…
It may soon be possible to identify patients who will develop tuberculosis, as scientists have identified changes in the blood specific to the disease. These findings are from an international study published in the August 19 issue of Nature and con…
Westminster, Colo. (August 26, 2010) — The term “macrophage” conjures images of a hungry white blood cell gobbling invading bacteria. However, macrophages do much more than that: Not only do they act as antimicrobial warriors, they also play cri…
Scientists at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University have developed a colony of mice that successfully fight off virulent transplanted cancers. “The mice are healthy, cancer-free and have a normal life span,” the 10-member team reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online edition to be published the week of April 28. The transplantation of the cancer cells in these special mice provokes a massive infiltration of white blood cells that destroy the cancer, said Zheng Cui, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pathology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the lead scientist.
Using nanotechnology to stop HIV viruses from entering cells is the ultimate aim of a new project at the University of California, Davis. The researchers hope to create tiny particles that can interfere with the proteins that viruses such as HIV use to attach to cells.
The particularly powerful ? and very scarce ? flexible forms of stem cells needed for medical research and treatment may now be both plentiful and simple to produce, with a new technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory ? and the source is as close as your own bloodstream. These flexible stem cells, able to morph into a variety of cell types, are called “pluripotent,” and before this Argonne research, they have been found only in fetal tissue, which is limited, and in bone marrow, which is difficult to collect. Pluripotent stem cells are important because they can generate all types of tissues found in the body, and the Argonne-developed technology can produce them from adult blood cells.
Like a well-trained soldier with honed survival skills, the common bacterium, Group A Streptococcus (GAS), sometimes can endure battle with our inborn (innate) immune system and cause widespread disease. By investigating the ability of combat-ready white blood cells (WBCs) to ingest and kill GAS, researchers have discovered new insights into how this disease-causing bacteria can evade destruction by the immune system. The research is being published this week in the Online Early Edition of the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.”
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have extracted part of the human immune system and reconstituted it in brewer’s yeast in a fashion that enables powerful machines to quickly identify new antibodies. The advance could have major repercussions for fundamental biological science as well as industries that use antibodies for sensors, biodetectors, diagnostic tools and therapeutic agents.