Vaccination has beaten back infections for more than a century. Now, it may be the next big step in battling cancer.

A selection of notable quotes from the American Society for Microbiology’s annual meeting

A method for culturing the infectious stage of the Plasmodium lifecycle could increase malaria vaccine production efficiency by tenfold, study authors say.

Antigen-specific T lymphocytes must be quantified in order to gauge the quality of an immune response. Typically this is accomplished using cytotoxicity assays or limiting dilution analysis (LDA), but these techniques are lengthy and provide indirect quantitation. Also, LDA cannot count nonproliferative cells. In 1996, Stanford University's Mark Davis developed an alternative strategy that overcomes these problems.1 Davis generated phycoerythrin-conjugated tetramers of human lymphocyte antigen (

President Biden’s planned rollout of additional COVID-19 vaccine doses is set to begin next week, but questions remain about who should get them.

Find the latest updates in this one-stop resource, including efficacy data and side effects of approved shots, as well as progress on new candidates entering human studies.

Microbes, traditionally thought to lack organelles, get a metabolic boost from geometric compartments that act as cauldrons for chemical reactions. Bioengineers are eager to harness the compartments for their own purposes.

Efforts are under way to develop a vaccine against one of the world's deadliest illnesses, cervical cancer. Along with a number of university research laboratories, at least a half-dozen biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are beginning clinical trials or are in preclinical development of such drugs. Efficacy in humans remains to be firmly established, but if the vaccines progress to later-phase trials, challenging jobs for immunologists, microbiologists, and biochemists will multiply. "

Leonard Hayflick has been unafraid to speak his mind, whether it is to upend a well-entrenched dogma or to challenge the federal government. At 86, he’s nowhere near retirement.