Pharmaceutical companies ramp up efforts to get the brain’s immune cells to help treat Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, but not everyone agrees the approach will be effective.

Scientists show that an influx of noradrenaline can halt immune cells in mice.

Scientists use a protein found in mucus membranes to ferry vaccines to the lymph nodes.

Following on the success of CAR T cells used to treat cancers of the blood, researchers have launched a Phase 1 clinical trial of genetically modified macrophages to target solid tumors.

Mix-and-match shots could simplify vaccine rollout and stimulate more-robust immune responses. Ongoing clinical trials will soon give answers.

When tumor cells are infected with an oncolytic virus carrying a modified CD19 gene, they become targets for CAR T cells engineered to recognize this molecular marker.

When mice that had suffered a stroke were given blood from a healthy donor, they experienced less tissue and neurological damage.

A small subset of uninfected people also had SARS-CoV-2-fighting T cells, a finding that scientists are still trying to figure out.

Microglia ingest nerve cell connections, leading to the loss of information stored in neuronal circuits.

Drugs targeting patients’ immune systems, rather than the virus itself, could be key to recovery from severe cases of the disease, some researchers suggest.

By trimming synapses in the adult mouse hippocampus, microglia help facilitate forgetting.

In the first clinical study of its kind in the US, researchers used CRISPR to modify CAR T cells to make them more potent against cancer, but the clinical benefits are unknown.

An accumulation of T cells and astrocytes in postmortem brain tissue hints at possible autoimmune origins for many cases of autism.