The Immune System – Multimedia

In this list, we take a look at 7 promising microfluidic developments from the past year.

2017 has been an exciting year for the drug discovery field. This list details the top 10 most-read news stories we published from the field this year.

Dr. Steven Almo explains in lay terms why protein structure and shape are important in developing drugs to fight disease.

Youth living with HIV (YLWH) are at risk for depression. This study aimed to identify trends in depressive symptoms for YLWH in a specialty-care clinic and follow up clinical treatment procedures.

This study investigates the role of histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) in chronic lymphocytic leukemia and establishes it as a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of this disease.

In summary, ISG15 expression levels are crucial for trophoblast morphology and function (migration/invasion). By blocking trophoblast invasion, reduced ISG15 levels could contribute to impaired spiral artery transformation that reduces utero-placental blood flow in preeclampsia. Thus, agents inducing ISG15 expression are likely to be therapeutic in preeclampsia.

We describe the natural history of a cohort of 12 patients with confirmed partial RAG1/2 mutations and autoimmunity at a young age. We were seeking the link between viral infections and autoimmunity and tested candidate biomarkers that may reflect the underlying RAG1/2 protein deficiency.

This is the first report of any unproductive recombinations in tumor specimen exome files, indicating opportunities to identify lymphocytes in the microenvironment that could have impacts on tumor development other than via antigen presentation to T-cells. Based on α/β relative recombination rates, α recombinations are more frequent. The association of detection of alpha-beta V(D)J recombinations, with high PD-1 RNA levels and high RNA levels representing antigen presenting functions.

An alternative animal model that mimics key features of the Zika virus infection, including its lingering presence in bodily fluids, has been developed at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, to help develop vaccines and treatments.

Here we describe a platform of T cell activation bioassays for the development of CD3 bispecific antibodies and engineered T cell immunotherapies.