News & HighlightsNews
How antibody therapy impacts COVID vaccines
...The findings suggest that feedback inhibition increases the coverage provided by COVID vaccines in people who previously received monoclonal antibodies. "Depending on the virus, feedback inhibition can either enhance immunity or inhibit it," says Michel C. Nussenzweig, who co-led the st...
Amid the rush for COVID-19 drugs, a case for the helicase
...Around the world, researchers working on developing treatments for COVID-19 are intensively examining each step of this process. Among them is Rockefeller’s Pels Family Professor Tarun Kapoor, whose lab has turned its expertise on stopping propagation of cancer cells to the virus, focus...
The common thread in severe COVID-19 
Patients who suffer from severe COVID-19 tend to have one thing in common: insufficient or defective proteins that help regulate the immune system, known as type I interferons (IFNs).   Two papers from the laboratory of Jean-Laurent Casanova previously demonstrated that at least 10 percent...
New design may boost potency of monoclonal antibodies against COVID
Monoclonal antibody drugs are among the few treatments available for COVID, providing a lifeline for those at high risk of severe illness and hospitalization. However, the usefulness of these drugs is limited because they are effective only when they can be administered early in the diseas...
West Nile infections are spiking. Here’s why the percentage of severe cases is so small
...Interestingly, it isn’t the first time they’ve uncovered a link between severe symptoms and the presence of these autoantibodies; they’ve previously documented the phenomenon in cases of severe COVID and flu pneumonia. We spoke to Casanova, a researcher with the university’s Stavros Nia...
An immune flaw may cause West Nile virus’s deadliest symptoms
...West Nile virus now joins a small but important group of infectious diseases with a documented link between interferon-neutralizing autoantibodies and cases resulting in the most severe or deadly symptoms, including influenza (5%), COVID (15%), and MERS pneumonia (25%). But with 40% of ...
Mathematical modeling suggests counties are still unprepared for COVID spikes
...A new paper in PNAS suggests there may have been a mathematical method, of sorts, to the madness of those early COVID days. The study tests a model that closely matches the patterns of case counts and deaths reported, county by county, across the United States between April 2020 and Jun...
Surprising reason that B cells benefit from booster shots
Certain infectious diseases, such as COVID or the flu, evolve constantly, shapeshifting just enough to outmaneuver our immune systems and reinfect us repeatedly. But subsequent reinfections often don’t lead to the most severe outcomes—for very good reason. Upon first exposure to a pathogen...
The blood may hold clues to some of COVID-19’s most mysterious symptoms
The most severe cases of COVID-19 begin with leaky blood vessels. Breaches in the vascular system cause inflammation and coagulation, as fluid floods the lungs. Meanwhile, a host of seemingly unrelated symptoms set in. Blood pressure drops, arrhythmias test the heart, and the central nervo...
What we need to worry about with avian flu—and what we don’t 
...You’d hope after the COVID pandemic that there’d be much more surveillance and screening. Instead, we have significant gaps in information. However, scientists are doing whatever they can. They’ve analyzed the sequence of the virus and calculated when this flu jumped from birds into cow...
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