Social Distancing Can Save Your Life and Someone Else’s
Translations: Russian (перевод) | Spanish (Español) | Portuguese (Portugues) For those thinking that COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is not something to worry about, I want to encourage all of you to implement social distancing. If (or when), this virus begins to spread rapidly through the population in the US, the medical … Read more
Discovery of a Pan-Cancer Killing T Cell
Crowther and colleagues screened clones of T cells isolated from a healthy donor and identified a clone (MC.7.G5) that recognized and killed many different types of cancer cells, including cells from solid tumors. When mixed with lung, melanoma, leukemia, breast, colon, prostate, bone, or ovarian cancer cell lines, MC.7.G5 released tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and … Read more
Using Flu Vaccines to Treat Cancer
Researchers discovered that injecting inactive flu virus directly into solid tumors triggered a systemic anti-tumor immune response. Thus, seasonal flu vaccines or other inactivated virus vaccines could be repurposed as agents that convert immune “cold” tumors into immune hot ones. Newman and colleagues found that influenza infection, which is respiratory virus that infects the lungs, … Read more
Signal or Nutrient: Breast Milk Lipids in Macrophages
A recent article identified a role for alkylglycerol (AKG)-type ether lipids in human breast milk in the regulation of the development of fat tissue in nursing babies (Figure 1). Intriguingly, the lipids affected tissue-resident macrophages in the fat tissue, adipose tissue macrophages (ATMs), not the adipose cells themselves. Using mice, Yu and colleagaues showed that … Read more