Cells

Immunotherapy is a promising cancer treatment, but getting it to work against solid tumors is difficult. A new study has not only identified a drug that’s effective against solid tumors, but may have uncovered a reason that immunotherapy often fails.

Scientists have grown mini eyes from human cells in the lab. These eye organoids provide good models of the real thing to help scientists study diseases that cause blindness and potentially find treatments.

Scientists at Duke University have created a real-time video that captures the frantic movements of a single virus as it tries to infect a cell. The video shows a part of the process that’s normally hard to see.

For the first time, human patients have received transfusions of blood cells that were grown from stem cells in a lab. A clinical trial investigating the safety of the procedure is currently underway, which could revolutionize blood transfusions.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so they say. Scientists have now demonstrated a new potential cancer vaccine that involves injections of dormant tumor cells to stimulate the immune system and help prevent the onset of cancer.

Drugs given to the whole body can be too much of a shotgun approach, damaging cells that aren’t meant to be targeted. A new study has found that cloaking drugs inside red blood cells could help guide powerful but toxic antibiotics to target bacteria.

Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite in humans, but exactly how it’s so good at spreading has been murky. Now scientists at Stockholm University have uncovered a sneaky Trojan horse technique that allows it to avoid the immune system.

Our immune system can unfortunately go rogue and attack healthy tissues. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have now engineered a protein that may help prevent these autoimmune diseases by boosting the number of regulatory T cells (Tregs).

In a significant step for neuroscience, researchers at Stanford University have transplanted human neurons into rat brains, seen them mature into hybridized brain circuits and then used them to influence the rodents’ behavior.

Senescent cells are blamed for many effects of aging and as such, they’re targeted by a range of anti-aging therapies. But we might not want to wipe them all out, as a new study suggests that some senescent cells play positive roles in healing.

Scientists have demonstrated that clusters of brain cells in a lab dish can be taught to play Pong in an approximation of sentience. This is the first time that these cells have performed goal-directed tasks, opening the door for better brain models.

In a world-first clinical trial, three babies have been born after receiving stem cell treatment for spina bifida. A stem cell patch is applied to the fetus’ spine while still developing in the womb, and early results are promising one year on.