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Allergy and immunology news

Disease tolerance research points to treatments that limit infection damage instead of killing microbes

Two identical mice experience the same deadly infection. One survives, while the other dies. Why? Scientists long thought the answer lay in the pathogen burden—the amount of harmful bacteria present in the body. They assumed ...

Microglia caught eating living motor neurons in ALS mice via unexpected immune pathway

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that, according to the CDC, currently affects around 35,000 Americans—with 5,000 more diagnosed each year. Risk climbs with age, and treatments only slow ...

Math and medicine join forces to solve a cancer mystery

Immunotherapy has transformed outcomes for many cancer patients. Unlike conventional treatments, these therapies do not attack tumors directly. Instead, they enable the body's immune system to identify and kill cancer cells ...

Newly found 'immune organ' inside skull directs brain defense

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered lymph node-like structures in the skull bone marrow of mice for the first time and demonstrated that they act as rapid first responders ...

Does your immune system learn like AI?

Could AI hold the key to answering questions that have stumped doctors and scientists for decades? A recent study at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) borrows concepts from machine learning to address an age-old riddle ...

An immune defect that may set Crohn's disease in motion

Crohn's disease, a condition characterized by widespread inflammation in the gut, may arise from a weakened immune response, according to new research from the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

New approach opens rare immune cells to genetic risk research

Much of how genetic risk leads to disease has remained hidden. In many cases, genetic variants linked to disease do not act on nearby genes along the chromosome. Instead, they influence genes located far away along the DNA ...

Building a blueprint to manipulate the immune system

Why do some vaccines protect for a lifetime, while threats like tumors and viruses present such an ongoing challenge? The answer lies in the immune system's memory and how invading pathogens hack the system.

Long non-coding RNA emerges as a 'kill switch' for macrophages

Macrophages are considered the "scavenger cells" of the immune system, but some pathogens exploit these very cells as hiding places. Researchers from the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg ...

Blood vessels guide immune cells to metastases

It has long been suspected that endothelial cells, the specialized cells lining the inner walls of blood vessels, play a key role in determining how the body's immune system responds to tumors. Researchers at the German Cancer ...