Researchers at Stanford University have developed a method to efficiently replace microglia, which are brain-specific immune cells, via a modified bone marrow transplant.

By using roughly 400 data points, from molecular to physical fitness, researchers have gained new insights into how organs such as the heart vs. the skin, and systems such as the immune and metabolic systems, age at different rates within individuals.

A research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany has for the first time managed to integrate the dark-field X-ray technique into a CT scanner suitable for clinical application. They have just published an article describing how they integrated this technology, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By combining an activator of the pro-apoptotic protein Bax with an inhibitor of the anti-apoptotic protein BCL-XL, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have been able to overcome resistance to apoptosis in both a wide range of cell lines and animal studies. The team reported its findings in the March 7, 2022, issue of Nature Communications.

Russia and Belarus are being frozen out of international science, with universities and research institutions across Europe suspending joint research projects and calling a halt to the formation of any new collaborations, following the invasion of Ukraine. Initial sanctions announced by European governments called for the severing of direct institution-to-institution links only, with many universities counseling individual researchers to maintain personal relations with Russian peers.

A team of researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that osmolytes such as mannitol, which are used to treat increased intraocular or intracranial pressure, can cause kidney damage by inducing hyperosmotic stress that leads to epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of the tubular epithelial cells.

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II molecules aberrantly induced by viral infection or inflammation, have been shown for the first time to form self-antigen/MHC class II complexes that initiate autoantibody production, according to a Japanese study published in the March 4, 2022, edition of Science Advances.

An analysis of brain scans of participants in the UK Biobank has shown there are significant differences between the condition of the brain before and after mild COVID-19 infection. These included a reduction in overall brain size, reduction in grey matter thickness in the orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampal gyrus, and changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally connected to the primary olfactory cortex. Infected participants also showed, on average, a larger cognitive decline than participants who had not contracted COVID-19.

“In 2015, when I started in this field…. people considered breast cancer a cold tumor,” Marleen Kok told the audience at the European Society of Medical Oncology’s 2022 Targeted Anticancer Therapy meeting (ESMO TAT). But the sensitivity of breast cancer to immunotherapy, or lack thereof, is “not a black and white phenomenon.”