Category Health/Medical

CD8+ T cells – known as “killer” T cells – are the assassins of the immune system. Once they are primed, they seek out and destroy other cells that are infected with virus or cells that are cancerous.

Priming involves dendritic cells – sentinels of the immune system. In an influenza infection in the lungs, for example, lung-migratory dendritic cells capture a piece of the viral antigen, and then migrate out of the lung to the place where naïve T cells reside, to present that antigen to the CD8+ T cells. This primes the T cells to know which cells to attack.

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are substantially more likely to harbor autoantibodies than people without COVID-19, according to a new study. Autoantibodies can be early harbingers of full-blown autoimmune disease. “If you get sick enough from COVID-19 to end up in the hospital, you may not be out of the woods even after you recover,” said PJ Utz, MD, professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford Medicine.

Utz shares senior authorship of the study, which will be published Sept...

In fruit flies, antioxidants reverse tumor-related cardiac dysfunction. A new study in animal models shows that the presence of a cancer tumor alone can lead to cardiac damage, and suggests the culprits are molecules are free radicals interacting with specific cells in the heart.

Tumors in mice and fruit flies led to varying degrees of cardiac dysfunction – particularly a decrease in the heart’s blood-pumping capabilities.

Adding specific types of antioxidants to food consumed by fruit flies with tumors reversed the damage to their hearts – a finding suggesting that harm caused by free radicals was the likely link between cancer and cardiac dysfunction.

“Cancer becomes a systemic disease...

More than 3 million people in America have dental implants, used to replace a tooth lost to decay, gum disease, or injury. Implants represent a leap of progress over dentures or bridges, fitting much more securely and designed to last 20 years or more.

But often implants fall short of that expectation, instead needing replacement in five to 10 years due to local inflammation or gum disease, necessitating a repeat of a costly and invasive procedure for patients.

“We wanted to address this issue, and so we came up with an innovative new implant,” says Geelsu Hwang, an assistant ...