Cancer can be wily, and those who treat the disease have amassed a wide array of weapons with which to fight it and kill tumors. Radiation therapy and various forms of chemotherapy were all thought to be separate but equal treatments. Now, however, new research is beginning to show that it’s not ...

An international team of researchers has uncovered the 13th gene to be associated with Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic disease linked to several types of cancer. The identification of the gene helps explain why some young patients develop early and lethal cancer, and also why relatives of these pa...

The potential of stem cells has so far gone largely untapped, despite the great promise that stem cells hold. But new research from Rockefeller University now shows that adult stem cells taken from skin can be used to clone mice using a procedure called nuclear transfer. Embryonic stem cells have...

The mountainous Chinese province of Yunnan is tucked into the country’s southwest corner, a scenic region that borders Burma, Laos and Vietnam. The province shares its rugged topography with the surrounding countries, but it shares a less favorable trait as well: a growing AIDS epidemic, driven b...

Each time a human cell divides it has to replicate three billion base pairs of DNA. All of the cell’s DNA must be copied once, but not more than once, within a very short period of time. But new research in yeast from Rockefeller University shows that instead of going about DNA replication in an ...

When an infection strikes, B cells act as the immune system’s tag-and-release team, hunting down the invading pathogen with incredible accuracy and labeling it with antibodies that inform other immune cells to destroy it. B cells are taught to recognize their prey inside tiny structures called ge...

Parasites have spent millions of years of evolution trying to outsmart the human immune system, and one of their tricks is to change their appearance so that the immune cells no longer recognize them. In the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes African sleeping sickness, new research suggest...

HIV vaccine science has hit a bit of a wall. For a vaccine to be really effective, it should be able to recruit different areas of the immune system. It should get one set of immune cells, called helper T cells, to recognize the AIDS virus and spur on another set of immune cells, the killer T cel...

Dendritic cells coordinate and direct the body’s immune response, playing a crucial role in our ability to fend off disease. By processing molecules from invading pathogens — called antigens — they can present those molecules for other immune cells to recognize and attack. But researchers have...

Cell death during animal development acts like an eraser — sculpting organs, the nervous system, fingers and toes — by removing unnecessary or unneeded cells. There are a few different processes that regulate how and when cells die, but research from Rockefeller University identifies a new type ...