Novel mechanism links genetic defect in IBD patients to gut leakiness: Study in mice and human tissue is the first to show how a disease mutation weakens barrier properties of epithelial cells lining the gut
A team of researchers led by a biomedical scientist at the University of California, Riverside, has identified a novel mechanism by which loss-of-function mutations in the gene PTPN2, found in many patients with inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, affect how intestinal epithelial cells maintain a barrier. The intestinal epithelium, a single layer of cells, plays […]
Researchers find immune component to rare neurodegenerative disease: Niemann-Pick disease type C, long thought to be tied to cholesterol metabolism, may eventually be treated with immune inhibitors
UT Southwestern researchers have identified an immune protein tied to the rare neurodegenerative condition known as Niemann-Pick disease type C. The finding, made in mouse models and published online in Nature, could offer a powerful new therapeutic target for Niemann-Pick disease type C, a condition that was identified more than a century ago but still […]
What The Lambda COVID-19 Variant Means For Us Right Now
The delta variant first identified in India is spreading widely in the United States, accounting for more than half of all new COVID-19 infections. But even as it becomes the dominant strain here, threatening to increase new infections among unvaccinated individuals, a new variant, called the lambda variant, or C.37, has also caught public health […]
Virus that causes COVID-19 can find alternate route to infect cells: COVID-19 drugs, vaccines still effective against mutating virus
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists identified how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, gets inside cells to cause infection. All current COVID-19 vaccines and antibody-based therapeutics were designed to disrupt this route into cells, which requires a receptor called ACE2. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that […]