News & HighlightsNews
Breaking down the science: How one virus teaches your body to fight another
...Most researchers study these pathogens—be they COVID-19, RSV, norovirus, countless common colds or any of the growing list of viruses making the rounds—one at a time and in isolation, so as to get a handle on how the immune system responds to each. But Alexander Lercher, a research asso...
Why studying how the immune system evolves could teach us much about evolution itself
...How does our immune system cope with these different evolutionary timescales? We are so slow and the bugs are quick—recall Covid, which we all watched evolving in real time. The immune system has essentially said to pathogens, okay, we can beat you by evolving even faster inside the B c...
Researchers track the mutations that allow HIV-1 to escape broadly neutralizing antibodies
...Experimental pipeline Building on their groundbreaking work with SARS-CoV-2—in which they documented how the notorious “spike” on the Covid viral envelope evolved in response to neutralizing antibodies found in patients—Stabell developed an approach that would allow them to study the mu...
Studying two very different viruses is helping this virologist develop new strategies for more potent antiviral treatments
...From that, we were able to identify useful intervention strategies in a timely way, such as when we determined that three doses of the original Covid vaccines were able to generate better antibodies than two doses. It was gratifying to be able to contribute so quickly to a public health...
Could a bout of COVID protect you from a severe case of flu?
...By analyzing mice that had been first infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then with influenza A virus, the scientists found that having recovered from COVID had a protective effect against the worst effects of the flu, and that this memory response was coming from an unexpected corner of the i...
In rare cases, autoantibodies can cause severe reactions to a live-attenuated virus Chikungunya vaccine that has been discontinued in the U.S.
...In 2021, Casanova's lab published work implicating autoantibodies in one-third of life-threatening reactions to the live-attenuated yellow fever vaccine (about 10% of the adverse reactions reported were considered life-threatening), as well as in severe disease caused by regular viruses from <...
Innovative approach opens the door to COVID nanobody therapies
COVID is not yet under control. Despite a bevy of vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals, the virus continues to mutate and elude us. One solution that scientists have been exploring since the early days of the pandemic may come in the form of tiny antibodies derived from llamas, ...
Boosters are key to protecting pregnant individuals and newborns against the worst effects of COVID
...But how long does this protection last? A new study from The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), published in Nature Communications, found that patients with a specific cocktail of COVID exposure—vaccination, up-to-date boosters, and previous infection—had the highe...
Rockefeller team finds flawed data in recent study relevant to coronavirus antiviral development
The COVID pandemic illustrated how urgently we need antiviral medications capable of treating coronavirus infections. To aid this effort, researchers quickly homed in on part of SARS-Cov-2’s molecular structure known as the NiRAN domain—an enzyme region essential to viral replication that’...
How antibodies from llamas may lead to COVID-19 treatment
...Nanobodies could become one more weapon in our arsenal against COVID-19, and potentially a widely available one.” In order to get there, Rout, Chait and their colleagues are now extracting antibodies from llamas and examining their molecular properties to identify those most effective a...
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