One of the major current goals of cancer immunotherapy research is to learn to predict who will benefit from it, and why, with the aim of broadening its successes.
Researchers at Queens University Belfast have developed a nanoparticle that could dampen inflammatory responses and improve survival in animal models of both sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome, both major causes of death and disability in hospitalized patients.
Breaking the immune system's tolerance to cancer cells has been the biggest breakthrough in cancer therapies in recent years, but to date the approach is successful only in a minority of patients.
Flu vaccines are simultaneously a triumph of modern medicine and an annual exercise in controlled chaos. Now, two separate research teams have been able to generate antigens that elicited immune responses to a highly conserved region of the type one influenza A virus.
The problem of variants of unknown significance , or VUS, is not a new one. Whether a change in DNA sequence actually has any effect in practice is a question that has been with genomic diagnostics since the first clinical test, for BRCA, became available in 1996. (See BioWorld Insight, Jan. 28, 2013.)
In genomewide association studies (GWAS), a variant in the gene FTO is the strongest obesity-correlated signal in the human genome. Since it was first flagged by GWAS seven years ago, though, why FTO is so strongly linked to obesity has remained a puzzle.
