Immunology News and Research

Latest Immunology News and Research

NIAID to tackle drug resistant TB

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has released its NIAID Research Agenda for Multidrug-Resistant (MDR) and Extensively Drug-Resistant (XDR) Tuberculosis (TB).

8 Jun 2007

Insights into a key strategy cancer cells use to survive and thrive

The discovery of how some abnormal cells can avoid a biochemical program of self-destruction by increasing their energy level and repairing the damage, is giving investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital insights into a key strategy cancer cells use to survive and thrive.

3 Jun 2007

New animal model for Lassa fever

Scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research have developed a new tool in the battle against a potential biological weapon, Lassa fever, which kills several thousand people each year and leaves thousands more with disabilities such as deafness and liver damage.

1 Jun 2007

Diagnosis of aspirin hypersensitivity

A position paper on the diagnosis of aspirin hypersensitivity by a team of European scientists from the Global Allergy and Asthma European Network (GA2LEN) has just been published on the Allergy Journal website.

1 Jun 2007

Uncontrolled asthma is highly prevalent

A survey of 1,812 patients with moderate-to-severe asthma revealed that the disease was not controlled in 55 percent, despite the fact that most had health insurance and visited their health care providers regularly.

1 Jun 2007

Discovery of inherited gene mutation for leukemia

Researchers have discovered the first inherited gene mutation that increases a person's risk for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), one of the most common forms of the disease.

1 Jun 2007

Researchers successfully treated type 1 diabetic mice with a vaccination

The vaccine they designed in this model included structures that the immune system mistakenly attacks in type 1 diabetes.

28 May 2007

MicroRNAs may increase cancer susceptibility

New evidence indicates that small pieces of noncoding genetic material known as microRNAs (miRNAs) might influence cancer susceptibility.

24 May 2007

Breakthrough in understanding how cancers spread

The University of Manchester study used embryonic stem (ES) cells to investigate how some tumours are able to migrate to other parts of the body, which makes the treatment of cancer much more difficult.

From The University of Manchester 24 May 2007

Discovery of fungi that uses radioactivity as an energy source

Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use.

24 May 2007

Cigarette use may explain asthma epidemic in children

The rise in cigarette use by adults over the past century may explain the asthma epidemic in children according to a study by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health.

22 May 2007

Scientists develop method to track immune system enzyme in live animals

Scientists supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) at the National Institutes of Health have created two mouse strains that will permit researchers to trace, in a live animal, the activity of an enzyme believed to play a crucial role both in the normal immune response as well as autoimmunity and B cell tumor development.

18 May 2007

Scientists convert the sequence of proteins into music

UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music.

17 May 2007

The risk of developing food allergy in premature or low-birth-weight children

Premature infants do not have an increased risk of developing food allergies than normal-birth-weight infants, according to new research in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) .

17 May 2007

Herpes infection may be symbiotic

Mice with chronic herpes virus infections can better resist the bacterium that causes plague and a bacterium that causes one kind of food poisoning, researchers report in Nature.

17 May 2007

Complement receptor 3 sends a signal to dampen the immune system

Researchers from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and The University of Pennsylvania reported that complement receptor 3 (CR3), a protein found on cell surfaces, inhibits dendritic cells, the sentinels of the immune system, from setting off an alarm signal that brings on a full immune response.

16 May 2007