Category Biology/Biotechnology

A type of anti-bacterial T cells, so-called MAIT cells, are strongly activated in people with moderate to severe COVID-19 disease, according to a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden that is published in the journal...

Kidney injury is a dreaded complication in patients hospitalized for COVID-19, with more than a third of patients ending up in need of dialysis. Patients with COVID-19-related kidney injury are also at much higher risk of death.

“We don’t known exactly why patients with severe COVID-19 have a high rate of kidney injury,” says Salim Hayek, M.D., a cardiologist at the Michigan Medicine (University of Michigan) Frankel Cardiovascular Center and senior author of a new observational study.” It is, however, becoming clearer that a hyperactive immune system plays a major role in the morbidity of COVID-19, including kidney-related complications.”

In the multi-center study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Hayek and an international team of experts report th...

These systems could potentially overcome computational hurdles faced by current digital technologies. In the September issue of the journal Nature, scientists from Texas A&M University, Hewlett Packard Labs and Stanford University have described a new nanodevice that acts almost identically to a brain cell. Furthermore, they have shown that these synthetic brain cells can be joined together to form intricate networks that can then solve problems in a brain-like manner.

“This is the first study where we have been able to emulate a neuron with just a single nanoscale device, which would otherwise need hundreds of transistors,” said Dr. R...

Plasma cells at the center of a novel treatment approach. Researchers from Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Deutsches Rheuma-Forschungszentrum (DRFZ) Berlin, a Leibniz Institute, have successfully treated two patients with the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus. Using daratumumab, a monoclonal antibody which targets specific immune cells known as plasma cells, the researchers were able to modulate the abnormal immunological memory processes found in these patients. Treatment induced sustainable clinical responses and resulted in a reduction in systemic inflammation. The results of this research have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The body’s immunological memory enables the immune system to respond more rapidly and effectively to pa...