Vaccinations alone may not be enough to protect people with compromised immune systems from infection, even if the vaccine has generated the production of antibodies, new research from the University of Cambridge has shown.
The ambition of the partnership is to treat immune-related diseases more precisely with existing therapies and to rapidly develop new ones.
As a young medical student in Nigeria, Segun was shocked by the disproportionate rate of death from treatable cancers across Africa. To help bring about change, he’s supporting knowledge sharing and skills training for students in Africa. He also co-founded an initiative to provide career guidance and mentoring for schoolchildren in Nigeria. In Cambridge, he hopes his PhD will lead to a way to enhance immune cells to deliver a ‘kiss of death’ to cancer.
Swetha was 12 years old when she decided she would help to unravel the mysteries of cancer. Twelve years later, she's studying for a PhD on cancer immunology, has launched a social enterprise to support the mental health of cancer patients in India and has designed a portable diagnostics tool to detect head and neck cancers.
Cambridge scientists have identified a signature in the blood that could help predict how well an individual will respond to vaccines. The discovery, published today in Nature Communications, may explain why, even among vulnerable patient groups, some individuals have better responses to vaccines than others.
Previously underexplored immune cell populations have been genetically mapped across multiple tissues to provide new insights into how our immune systems work.
Markers in our blood – ‘fingerprints’ of infection – could help identify individuals who have been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, several months after infection even if the individual had only mild symptoms or showed no symptoms at all, say Cambridge researchers.
New research provides important insights into the role played by the immune system in preventing – and in some cases increasing the severity of – COVID-19 symptoms in patients. It also finds clues to why some people experience ‘long COVID’.
The drug remdesivir is likely to be a highly effective antiviral against SARS-CoV-2, according to a new study by a team of UK scientists. Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe giving the drug to a patient with COVID-19 and a rare immune disorder, and observing a dramatic improvement in his symptoms and the disappearance of the virus.
The brain is uniquely protected against invading bacteria and viruses, but its defence mechanism has long remained a mystery. Now, a study in mice, confirmed in human samples, has shown that the brain has a surprising ally in its protection: the gut.
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