A team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, used a new drug to save the life of a patient with immune thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (iTTP), a rare disorder characterized by uncontrolled clotting throughout the small blood vessels. The group describes the first clinical use of the drug for iTTP in the New England Journal of Medicine.

HIV has proven a hard target for vaccine design. The most promising approach, germline-targeting (GT), proposes a series of immunizations: a first shot to activate inexperienced B cells - antibody-producing white blood cells - followed by a sequence of immunogens that are more and more like the HIV Envelope (Env) protein. The ultimate goal of GT immunization is to coach B cells into producing broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) capable of binding to conserved sites on HIV Env, which seldom change despite HIV's penchant for rapid diversification.

"I consider the drugs available on the marked today as the first generation of weight-loss drugs. Now we have developed a new type of weight-loss drug that affects the plasticity of the brain and appears to be highly effective."

So says Associate Professor and Group Leader Christoffer Clemmensen, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, who is senior author of the new study, which has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme in England has not only been associated with a substantial reduction in cervical disease, but has done so in all socioeconomic groups, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

Although women living in the most deprived areas are still at higher risk of cervical disease than those in less deprived areas, the results show that well planned and executed public health interventions can both improve health and reduce health inequalities.

Deaths from cancer or infections can occur when available treatments are ineffective. Once turned on, pregnane X receptor (PXR) activates the expression of genes encoding enzymes that metabolize external chemicals, including drugs. This causes a significant drop in the effectiveness of chemotherapy, antivirals and other pharmaceuticals. Blocking the PXR activity is notoriously difficult, as many drugs that bind the protein, whether intentionally or unintentionally, activate it. Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have leveraged chemical and structural studies in the design of PXR inhibitors to better understand this process.

Researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center have found in pre-clinical studies that an experimental gene therapy for genital and oral herpes removed 90% or more of the infection and suppressed how much virus can be released from an infected individual, which suggests that the therapy would also reduce the spread of the virus.

"Herpes is very sneaky. It hides out among nerve cells and then reawakens and causes painful skin blisters," said Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch.

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough that offers promise for developing new immune therapies for cancer. They have discovered that a vaccine adjuvant - or "booster" - called C100 promotes potent anti-tumour immunity when it is injected directly into tumours in an animal model.

The scientists found that C100, derived from chitin - one of the most common building materials in nature, and which gives strength to the exoskeletons of crustaceans, insects, and the cell walls of fungi - is highly effective at stimulating a key sensing and signalling molecule which regulates anti-tumour immune responses.