immunology

A sugar that’s less abundant in the blood of people with diabetes binds to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein and disrupts the virus’s ability to fuse with cells.  

Human data and experiments in mice challenge the common use of anti-inflammatory drugs to treat pain.

Deletions in the sleepy lizard genome leave it without an important type of T cells found in most other vertebrates.

Compared to mice who got the doses in separate limbs, animals receiving flu shots in the same paw for both a first and second dose had better-trained memory B cells that bound tighter to the vaccine antigen.

Use of the drugs in children under the age of two was associated with lower antibody levels after the jabs—perhaps, researchers suggest, due to microbiome alterations.

A mouse study points to a possible mechanism by which the smallpox vaccine helped eradicate the disease in the 1980s.

Several lines of evidence suggest that targeting the body’s defense pathways might help treat a subset of people with the psychiatric disorder. But many open questions remain.

Scientists have pinpointed several pathways through which the immune system could disrupt neuronal functioning and thereby lead to psychotic symptoms.

In vitro and mouse experiments show how cancer cells forced through tiny pores—mimicking the physical experience of metastasis—resisted programmed cell death and avoided detection by the immune cells that would normally kill them.

New research in mice reveals why natural killer cells, normally effective at hunting cancer, are sometimes stopped in their tracks.  

Making specific alterations to the bacterial population in a rat’s lungs either better protects the animals against multiple sclerosis–like symptoms or makes them more vulnerable, a study finds—the first demonstration of a lung-brain axis.

Roseolovirus infection disrupts how the body trains immune cells not to attack it, a mouse study shows.

Hultin’s work helped identify the virus behind the 1918 flu pandemic.

The immune cells facilitate healing, but they may also help tumors metastasize to the lungs after injury, a study in mice finds.