News by Subject Medicine & Health

New research conducted in monkeys reveals that T cells are not critical for the recovery of primates from acute COVID-19 infections.

A new study reports that among individuals who had an allergic reaction to their first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, all who went on to receive a second dose tolerated it. Even some who experienced anaphylaxis following the first dose tolerated the second dose.

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the safety of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in patients who experienced an allergic reaction to the first dose.

How early is the course of COVID-19, mild or severe, determined? In Cell, researchers examined nasal cells sampled from patients at the time of diagnosis, looking for differences between those who developed severe disease and those who experienced a mild illness. Cells from patients who developed severe COVID-19 exhibited a more muted antiviral response. If the early stages of infection can determine disease severity, it opens a path for scientists to develop early therapeutic interventions.

There are many reasons that an intranasal vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be helpful in the fight against COVID-19 infections, University of Alabama at Birmingham immunologists Fran Lund, Ph.D., and Troy Randall, Ph.D., write in a viewpoint article in the journal Science.

The body's first encounter with the coronavirus happens in the nose and throat. New work in Cell suggests that responses in this early battleground help determine who will develop severe COVID-19 and who will have only mild or no illness. It used single-cell RNA sequencing of all the cell types recovered from nasal swabs of people with and without COVID-19.

Now, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and collaborators have created an "atlas" that charts how 152 different antibodies attack a major piece of the SARS-CoV-2 machinary, the spike protein, as it has evolved since 2020. Their study, published in Cell, highlights antibodies that are able to neutralize the newer strains, while identifying regions of the spike protein that have become more resistant to attack.

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown repair process in the brain that they hope could be harnessed and enhanced to treat seizure-related brain injuries.

Research in mice, published today in Science Immunology by researchers at the Babraham Institute, UK and VIB-KU Leuven, Belgium, provides two solutions with potential to overcome a key clinical limitation of immune cell therapies.