With age, senescent cells become detrimental to tissues. Mayo Clinic scientists have observed this phenomenon in the lung alveoli, where senescent macrophages accumulated in aging tissue and in early stages of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) driven by the Kras oncogene. “We found that the macrophages were present in the earliest stages of the disease. Strategies targeting these cells for elimination or preventing their accumulation would be worthwhile to test in other conditions (assuming we find they occur),” Darren Baker, a Mayo Clinic senescent cell biologist and senior author of the study, told BioWorld.
With the rise of antibiotic resistance, treatment options against Yersinia pestis bacteria that cause pneumonic plague could also become limited. Antibody treatment has been effective in animal models of plague, but no approved human vaccine exists against this fatal disease.
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are often recurrent. The organism does not always establish an effective line of defense that protects from reinfection. The key lies in two reservoirs of bacteria and how tissue-resident memory T cells (TRMs) trigger the immune response. A recent paper from the Pasteur Institute in France describes how these cells mediate immunity to defeat reinfection.
Hilleman Laboratories Singapore Pte Ltd. and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have established a collaboration to explore using novel circular ribonucleic acid (circRNA) technology to develop a Nipah virus vaccine and to validate the technology platform for application for other infectious diseases pathogens.
The targeted delivery of optimized stem cells directly into injured tissues has been used to maximize efficacy and minimize systemic exposure. Still, despite hundreds of clinical trials evaluating mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy as a treatment, clinical efficacy remains highly variable. Investigators at Case Western Reserve University have developed an optimized combination of cytokines and growth factors applied to MSCs (HXB-319).
Evaxion Biotech A/S has unveiled the technology behind its proprietary genetic adjuvant developed to enhance the effectiveness of DNA and mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer.
Proteolysis targeting chimera (PROTAC) compounds comprising an E3 ubiquitin ligase binding moiety covalently linked to non-receptor tyrosine-protein kinase TYK2-targeting moiety have been reported in a Kymera Therapeutics Inc. patent as potentially useful for the treatment of neurological, inflammatory and endocrine disorders, autoimmune diseases, transplant rejection, graft-vs.-host disease and cancer.
Exo Therapeutics Inc. has announced its lead program directed against TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1) for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. The company is now approaching identification of a development candidate for its lead program, an exosite-targeted compound that selectively reprograms the activity of TBK1 in the STING pathway that drives pathogenic signaling in diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, Aicardi-Goutières syndrome and others.
China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has given drug clinical trial approval for two new COVID-19 vaccines against the current XBB variants developed by Westvac Biopharma Co. Ltd. and West China Medical Center at Sichuan University.
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