Research News

Two new UC Davis Health studies explored how differences in skin composition may lead to dermatological conditions, such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis.

“Skin does not have a uniform composition throughout the body,” said Emanual Maverakis, professor of dermatology, molecular medical microbiology at UC Davis and senior author on both studies. “Different skin characteristics at different body sites may affect the skin’s susceptibility to certain diseases.”

A new mechanism that slows down and may even prevent the natural ageing of immune cells – one of the nine hallmarks of ageing – has been identified by an international team led by UCL scientists.

Published in Nature Cell Biology, researchers say the discovery in-vitro (cells) and validated in mice was ‘unexpected’ and believe harnessing the mechanism could extend the life of the immune system, allowing people to live healthier and longer, and would also have clinical utility for diseases such as cancer and dementia.

it may be the most baffling quirk of COVID: What manifests as minor, flu-like symptoms in some individuals spirals into severe disease, disability, or even death in others. A new paper published in Nature may explain the genetic underpinnings of this dichotomy.

Lower immunity and recurring infections are common in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet now show that the immune system of people with diabetes has lower levels of the antimicrobial peptide psoriasin, which compromises the urinary bladder’s cell barrier, increasing the risk of urinary tract infection. The study is published in Nature Communications.

Because of their highly active metabolism, many tumors are susceptible to a special type of cell death, ferroptosis. Nevertheless, cancer cells often manage to escape this fate. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center have now discovered a new mechanism by which normal as well as cancer cells protect themselves against ferroptosis. Knowledge of these molecular connections could provide new starting points for the treatment of tumors.

Neuromorphic computing system technology mimicking the human brain has emerged and overcome the limitation of excessive power consumption regarding the existing von Neumann computing method. A high-performance, analog artificial synapse device, capable of expressing various synapse connection strengths, is required to implement a semiconductor device that uses a brain information transmission method. This method uses signals transmitted between neurons when a neuron generates a spike signal.

Pfizer announced positive top-line results from its pivotal E.U. Phase 3 study in infants (NCT04546425) evaluating its 20-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine candidate (20vPnC) for the prevention of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), pneumonia, and acute otitis media caused by the 20 Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) serotypes contained in the vaccine for the pediatric population.

Harvard Medical School scientists and colleagues at Stanford University have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic tool that can detect diseases on chest X-rays directly from natural-language descriptions contained in accompanying clinical reports.

Chronic diseases often lead to fibrosis, a condition in which organ tissue suffers from excessive scarring. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now developed an immunotherapy that specifically targets the cause – activated fibroblasts – while leaving normal connective tissue cells unharmed. If this approach is also found to work in humans, it could lead to an effective treatment for fibrosis.