The relationship between cancer, cancer treatments, inflammation and immunity had another layer of complexity added to it with the report this week that chemotherapy can contribute to promoting tumor growth via activating the inflammasome in some types of immune system cells, which ultimately led to angiogenesis.
Arguments have gone back and forth for some time now on whether cancer cells use a developmental program called the epithelial to mesenchymal transition, or EMT, to metastasize.
If you have to run a marathon, do it as a relay. That, apparently, is the immune system's solution to dealing with chronic infections, a study published in the Nov. 30, 2012, issue of Science suggested.
Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and when I reflect on AIDS, I generally do it with a sense of amazement about how far we have come in the treatment of HIV since AIDS first came to the attention of the U.S. medical establishment, in form of a cluster of pneumocystis pneumonia infections in young men, in 1981. An AIDS-free generation is no longer a pipe dream. With all the progress that’s being made, though, I’ve been struck how one thing that seems to keep receding into the distance – like a manifestation of the joke that the future is...
Oncolytic viruses have aspects that are similar to both cancer immunotherapy and of gene therapy. As with gene therapy, the basic idea behind oncolytic viral therapy is to make a virus that will specifically infect certain cells.
Scientists at Amgen Inc., with colleagues at the Texas A & M Health Science Center, have developed an antibody that, when administered to obese cynomolgus monkeys, improved the animals' insulin sensitivity and lipid profiles, and led to significant weight loss.
Many of the scientists who are attempting to harness stem cells for tissue repair and regeneration do so via a transplantation approach. That pathway consists of finding a source of stem cells and transplanting them.
While searching for mechanisms of resistance to one targeted cancer therapy, researchers have identified a signaling mechanism that can lead to resistance to multiple targeted and chemotherapy cancer drugs alike.
Vaccines are among the greatest public health triumphs ever. But they do not work equally well for all infectious diseases. "There are certain diseases which we have had a hard time controlling," Nimalan Arinaminpathy told BioWorld Today.
The reason a highly effective HIV vaccine has eluded medical researchers to date is the speed with which the virus evolves. HIV, it appears, can find ways around any antigen that has been thrown at it to date.
