News by Subject Medicine & Health

More than 90 percent of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancers could be prevented by widespread uptake of the HPV vaccine. Yet, vaccine use in the United States falls short of public health goals.

Meningococcus group B, the most prevalent strain of meningococcal infection, is prevented with 79 per cent effectiveness in children and young adults inoculated with the 4CMenB vaccine, also known as Bexsero, according to a new collaborative study from researchers in Portugal and the UK and led by the University of Bristol which evaluated the vaccine's performance in a real-world setting. The findings are published today [1 December] in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

KU Leuven researchers published results of their vaccine candidate, a vector vaccine based on the yellow fever vaccine. The paper shows that the vaccine protects hamsters from infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus after a single dose. It is also effective in monkeys.

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have shown that the skin fibrosis seen in chronic graft-versus-host disease is mediated by transforming growth factor-β1 expressed by epidermal cells undergoing programmed death when they are stimulated by interferon-γ. Further investigations elucidate the sclerodermatous changes characteristic of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions such as systemic sclerosis, discoid lupus erythematosus and toxic epidermal necrolysis, thus opening up research avenues in pharmacotherapeutics based on targeting apoptosis and interferon-γ.

The role of a protein in detecting the common cold virus and kickstarting an immune response to fight infection has been uncovered by a team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the National University of Singapore.

The findings, published in the online edition of Clinical Cancer Research on Nov. 4, 2020, suggest that BMS-986178, an investigational OX40 agonist, has an acceptable safety profile in patients with advanced solid tumors, whether used as monotherapy or in combination with the checkpoint inhibitors nivolumab (Opdivo®) and/or ipilimumab (Yervoy®).