News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that dogs can suffer from the same type of autoimmune encephalitis that people do. The finding could lead to better screening methods for diagnosis and possibly more effective treatments for canine encephalitis.

Findings from an innovative new study led by researchers at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and published this week in Nature Microbiology reveal that the way in which human fungal pathogens form colonies can significantly impact their ability to cause disease. Understanding how these colonies form could lead to new therapies that target these infections in critically ill patients.

Scientists are one step closer to discovering the causes of immune diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, GSK and Biogen, under the Open Targets initiative, has shown that thousands of differences in DNA between individuals, associated with immune diseases, are linked with the switching-on of a specific subtype of immune cells. Published in Nature Genetics, this study could lead to finding drug targets for developing new treatments.

When we eat red meat, the animal carbohydrate Neu5Gc is incorporated in our tissues, where it generates inflammation. UC San Diego researchers discovered how gut bacteria enzymes strip our cells of Neu5Gc, introducing the possibility of using the enzymes to reduce the risk of inflammatory diseases.

A novel vaccine developed at Penn Medicine protected almost all mice and guinea pigs exposed to the herpes virus. This may lead to the vaccine being tested in human studies.

A big way chemotherapy works is by prompting cancer cells to commit suicide, and scientists have found a pathway the most common lung cancer walks to avoid death. Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University have found a first step appears to be lung cancer cells expressing high levels of the molecule TIMP-1, classically considered a tumor inhibitor but at high levels already associated with a poor prognosis for patients.

A study into the impact of flavored e-cigarettes, on allergic airways disease, suggests that some flavors may worsen the severity of diseases such as asthma. For the first time a model of asthma was used to investigate the effect of a range of popular e-cigarette flavors, with and without nicotine.

José Enrique Mejía, Inserm researcher at Unit 1043 Center for Pathophysiology of Toulouse Purpan and Cristina Domingo from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin have recently shown that around half of children initially protected by the yellow fever vaccination at 9 months of age lose that protection within the next 2 to 5 years, due to disappearance of the neutralizing antibodies. This research has been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

'DNA mechanotechnology' is a new field to engineer DNA machines that generate, transmit and sense mechanical forces at the nanoscale.