Scientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have engineered T cells to produce a potent anti-cancer cytokine, but only when they encounter tumor cells. The immunotherapy eliminated melanoma and pancreatic cancer in mice without major side effects, and it offers a promising new strategy for fighting these and other hard-to-treat cancers.

A serious condition that can cause the kidneys to suddenly stop working could be treated with existing medicines, a new study shows.

In a study in mice scientists found that medicines usually used to treat angina and high blood pressure prevented much of the long-term damage to the kidney and cardiovascular system caused by acute kidney injury (AKI).

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been devastating the entire world. While the vaccination program is advancing, drug treatments for COVID-19 are still highly important for those who become infected. Now, a team at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), National Center for Global Health and Medicine (NCGM), Tohoku University, NCI/NIH, and Kumamoto University has designed and synthesized compounds that have the potential to be novel drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2.

To design drugs that stall the growth of aggressive cancers, it helps to know the structures of the proteins that are revving the cancers' engines.

In a series of three papers published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scripps Research scientists have illuminated the three-dimensional structure of phosphoinositide 3-kinase alpha (PI3Kα), a protein often mutated in cancer cells.

Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a drug that potently neutralizes SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus, and is equally effective against the Omicron variant and every other tested variant. The drug is designed in such a way that natural selection to maintain infectiousness of the virus should also maintain the drug’s activity against future variants.

An international team of researchers has uncovered a new mechanism that enables cancer cells to move throughout the body, providing a potential new target to stop metastasis, which is responsible for 90 per cent of cancer deaths.

In findings published in Nature, the team identifies that cancer cells move faster when they are surrounded by thicker fluids, a change that occurs when lymph drainage is compromised by a primary tumour.

Scientists at Scripps Research have reported success in initial tests of a new, nanotech-based strategy against autoimmune diseases.

The scientists, who reported their results on November 23, 2022, in the journal ACS Nano, engineered cell-like "nanoparticles" that target only the immune cells driving an autoimmune reaction, leaving the rest of the immune system intact and healthy.