Lifeboat Foundation

A computational model of the more than 26 million atoms in a DNA-packed viral capsid expands our understanding of virus structure and DNA dynamics, insights that could provide new research avenues and drug targets, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report in the journal Nature.

“To fight a virus, we want to know everything there is to know about it. We know what’s inside in terms of components, but we don’t know how they’re arranged,” said study leader Aleksei Aksimentiev, an Illinois professor of physics. “Knowledge of the internal structures gives us more targets for drugs, which tend to focus on receptors on the surface or replication proteins.”

Continue reading “First atom-level structure of packaged viral genome reveals new properties and dynamics” »

The first UK patients received the experimental mRNA therapy – a type of immunotherapy treatment called mRNA-4359 – at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust as part of a phase 1/2 clinical trial. The trial aims to evaluate its safety and potential for treating melanoma, lung cancer and other ‘solid tumour’ cancers.

The treatment is designed using messenger RNA (mRNA) and works by presenting common markers of tumours to the patient’s immune system. This should help to train patients’ immune systems to recognise and fight cancer cells expressing these markers, but also potentially eliminate cells that may suppress the immune response.

The University of Chicago Medicine is among the first 30 institutions in the country to offer tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for advanced melanoma, immediately activating as an authorized treatment center after federal regulators approved the treatment on February 16, 2024.

TILs are…

Some patients with advanced melanomas — those that can’t be surgically removed or have spread to other parts of the body — don’t respond to standard treatment options such as immunotherapies and targeted therapies. TIL therapy gives these patients another therapeutic option: a completely personalized treatment made from the patient’s own cells that needs to be administered only once, since the cells remain in the body and keep performing their tumor-attacking duties.

Continue reading “UChicago Medicine to offer TIL therapy for advanced melanoma” »

A new class of cancer treatments that harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors is being hailed as the biggest thing in oncology since CAR-T revealed the promise of cell therapy more than a decade ago.

There’s a growing pipeline of cancer therapy candidates that harness a patient’s immune system to fight tumors.

During a sunny morning on Florida’s Gulf Coast last month, an 11-year-old golden retriever named Hunter bounded through a pine grove.

A Yale researcher developed a vaccine that can slow or halt certain cancers in dogs. And it could be used to treat humans in the future.

Continue reading “Novel cancer vaccine offers new hope for dogs — and those who love them” »

This year, Rockefeller scientists plumbed the depths of wound repair and tackled how songbirds solve problems; they used microchips to grow mini-lungs and proposed an environmental trigger for multiple sclerosis. Efforts to combat COVID, Hepatitis B, and other infections bore fruit, and countless papers shed light on basic research, answering questions that have long baffled biologists. Here are some of the intriguing discoveries that came out of Rockefeller in 2023.

Old sperm, new mutations

As the male reproductive system ages, it becomes more and more susceptible to mutations. New research from the laboratory of Li Zhao explored this phenomenon in fruit flies, by focusing on how mutations arise during the formation of sperm. The team found that, while mutations are common in the testes of both young and old flies, the repair mechanisms that remove those mutations and maintain genomic integrity during spermatogenesis become less efficient in older individuals, leading to the accumulation and persistence of more mutations in older flies.

Thrombolytic therapy administered longer after the onset of ischemic stroke than current recommendations did not demonstrate improved clinical outcomes as compared to placebo, according to a recent trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Minjee Kim, MD, associate professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology’s Division of Neurocritical Care, was a co-author of the study.

Ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain is blocked or reduced, and accounts for nearly 90% of all strokes, according to statistics from the American Stroke Association.

Blood in animals provides oxygen and nutrients to the organs and cells of the body. However, if blood supply is interrupted, these cells soon perish and organs are damaged.

The Melanoma Antigen Gene (MAGE) family consists of more than 40 proteins in humans, most of which are only present in the testes under healthy conditions. However, in many cancers, these proteins are found in high levels in tissues where they are not usually expressed and are believed to play a role in promoting cancer progression. Researchers from the Bhogaraju group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Grenoble have gained new insights into how these proteins bind their targets. The findings could potentially aid in the development of drugs against chemotherapy-or radiotherapy-resistant cancers.

The findings are published in The EMBO Journal, in an article titled, “Structural basis for RAD18 regulation by MAGEA4 and its implications for RING ubiquitin ligase binding by MAGE family proteins.”

“MAGEA4 is a cancer-testis antigen primarily expressed in the testes but aberrantly overexpressed in several cancers,” the researchers wrote. “MAGEA4 interacts with the RING ubiquitin ligase RAD18 and activates translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), potentially favoring tumor evolution. Here, we employed NMR and AlphaFold2 (AF) to elucidate the interaction mode between RAD18 and MAGEA4, and reveal that the RAD6-binding domain (R6BD) of RAD18 occupies a groove in the C-terminal winged-helix subdomain of MAGEA4.”