News by Subject Biology

The kidneys often become bulky and dysfunctional in diabetes, and now scientists have found that one path to this damage dramatically reduces the kidney's ability to clean up after itself.

Scientists have developed a new tool that mimics how the virus that causes COVID-19 infects a cell, potentially speeding the search for treatments against the disease. The tool is a fluorescent nanoparticle probe that uses the spike protein on the virus surface to bind to cells and trigger the process that pulls the virus into cells. The probe could be used to rapidly gauge how drugs and compounds might block the virus from infecting cells.

A new study led by Boston Medical Center researchers indicates a well-known biomarker that serves as a marker for earlier diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases is now detectable in the eye. Neurofilament light chain, a protein previously detected in cerebrospinal fluid and blood that is being explored as a biomarker to detect neurodegeneration, has now been identified in the vitreous humor, or fluid within the eye.

New research has uncovered the previously unknown presence of CD19 -- a B cell molecule targeted by chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapy to treat leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma -- in brain cells that protect the blood brain barrier (BBB). This discovery may potentially be the cause for neurotoxicity in patients undergoing CD19 directed CAR T cell immunotherapy, according to the research team led by Avery Posey, PhD, an assistant professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania.

This study aims at investigating the antimicrobial and antibiofilm effect of rosemary and ginger essential oil-based nano-sized formulations on colistin resistant K. pneumonia clinical isolates.