STAT

OCTOBER 6, 2023

If the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us one thing, it is how little we really know about how the human immune system works. Decoding and harnessing the power of the human immune system is one of the great frontiers of biomedicine.

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STAT

MARCH 27, 2024

Researchers studying the ways these systems change with age refer to them collectively as “immunosenescence,” or, more poetically, the “ twilight of immunity. ” But even as scientific understanding of the phenomenon has grown over the past decade, the forces driving it remain murky.

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STAT

MARCH 28, 2024

For scientists who study the human immune system, the penny dropped at different points in the early frenetic months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking back now, many marvel at the realization that they witnessed and were able to chronicle something no other scientists had ever actually seen.

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STAT

NOVEMBER 24, 2023

The evidence presented to the WHO team pointed to what’s sometimes called an immunity gap that was created by the pandemic. But a rapidly organized meeting Thursday between the World Health Organization and health officials in China assuaged much of that concern.

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STAT

MARCH 27, 2025

And while the meeting took place two days after a report that the department had tapped vaccine critic David Geier to conduct a study looking for a link between immunizations and autism, the Louisiana senator said that issue did not come up.      Read the rest…

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STAT

JANUARY 18, 2024

New research published Thursday in Science has identified proteins present in the blood of people with long Covid that could point the way to a much-needed diagnostic test and possibly to future therapeutic targets.

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STAT

OCTOBER 29, 2024

But many other modes of immunotherapy for cancer were approved first — checkpoint blockade drugs like Keytruda and engineered immune cell therapies like Yescarta. Cancer vaccines may also be able to help train the immune system to recognize and kill cancers related to viruses like HPV.

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STAT

MARCH 3, 2025

The “swine flu” virus was distinct enough from previous H1N1 viruses that it could cause a pandemic, but it had enough genetic similarities to viruses that had circulated for decades that many people had some immune defenses, which blunted its severity. Read the rest…

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STAT

JANUARY 22, 2025

Immune checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that can help make the immune system recognize and destroy cancer more aggressively, are one of the most important medicines in cancer treatment today.

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STAT

MAY 21, 2024

Checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that unleash the immune system, have turned into blockbuster therapies that have transformed outcomes for some patients with deadly cancers.

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STAT

MARCH 21, 2024

This “summer of discovery,” as McKenna called it, brought him back to the immune system. McKenna discussed possibilities with his teenagers and Prometheus’ chief scientific officer.

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STAT

APRIL 11, 2023

No two people have quite the same immune system. And while that fact can make matching bone marrow and organ transplants torturously difficult, a Bay Area biotech believes it can harness immune diversity to treat a range of deadly cancers.

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STAT

MARCH 19, 2025

The immunization seminar during my residency was dry and uninspiring. I started my medical career in the early 1990s as a vaccine nihilist. I offered vaccines to my patients and was adherent to the routine schedules, but certainly did not go out of my way to encourage or cajole.

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STAT

OCTOBER 25, 2022

That’s the premise behind Normunity, which launched Tuesday with $65 million from investors to develop a suite of drugs that it dubs “immune normalizers” to help restore the natural ability of the immune system’s T cells to infiltrate and destroy tumors.

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STAT

MARCH 22, 2024

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized a new antibody to protect immunocompromised individuals against Covid-19.    The drug, known as Pemgarda and marketed by the biotech Invivyd, is the first such drug to become available since the agency pulled AstraZeneca’s Evusheld off the market in January 2023.

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STAT

MAY 10, 2023

Prior research has shown that people with obesity have deficiencies in their “natural killer” cells, or NK cells — immune cells that help in combating cancer. A new small study suggests they may also be useful in fighting cancer.

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STAT

OCTOBER 23, 2023

The risks of severe neonatal morbidity, neonatal death, and admission to the neonatal intensive care unit were all significantly lower during the first month of birth in infants whose mothers were vaccinated against Covid-19, and protection against the virus continued for up to six months after birth, according to a new study published Monday in JAMA (..)

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STAT

OCTOBER 10, 2023

LONDON — In this case, it was neither the chicken nor the egg that came first. Rather, it started with some specially engineered cells in a lab. The chicken cells had had their genomes edited, not to correct a faulty mutation, but in an effort to blunt the bird flu virus.

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STAT

JANUARY 17, 2025

Today, we see insulin-producing cells survive in a human body without triggering an immune rejection, and have some big news from CMS. Hope those of you who were in San Francisco for J.P. Morgan are resting, recovering, and not coping with any quad-emic strains. Read the rest…

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STAT

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Alison Buttenheim was floored by a sign she saw in her doctor’s office when she went to get the first jab of the two-dose shingles vaccine to protect her against painful flare-ups of varicella zoster. “Medicare patients cannot receive Tdap or zoster vaccines here. They need to obtain [them] at their pharmacy.

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PharmaVoice

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

After dropping its neuroscience program earlier this year, the clinical-stage oncology company is doubling down on a candidate targeting the MAPK pathway.

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Immunity Immunization 246

STAT

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Alison Sbrana was in the belly of an opera when her life changed. Down in the pit, surrounded by fellow orchestra members, she’d been straining to play her flute for half the show. As performers overhead enveloped the audience in arias, Sbrana felt like the Hulk was pulling on the tendons in the right side of her neck.

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Pharma Times

MAY 2, 2024

Bacteroides fragilis in the gut improves immunity and immunotherapy treatment responses

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STAT

AUGUST 16, 2024

Pfizer and BioNTech said Friday that their combined mRNA vaccine candidate against influenza and Covid-19 showed a lower immune response against one type of influenza, influenza B, in a Phase 3 trial, a setback for the vaccine. ” Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Pharma Times

MAY 30, 2024

Affecting the immune system, various forms of SCID are estimated to affect one in 75,000 to 100,000 newborns

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STAT

JANUARY 24, 2024

This happens to people whose immune systems are compromised, whether through disease or treatment, leaving them vulnerable to infections that last weeks, months, or, in one known case, a year.

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PharmaVoice

JULY 14, 2022

The company’s chief medical officer discusses its lead candidate and how it fits into wider oncology trends.

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STAT

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

There’s symptom management, hopeful periods of remission often followed by relapses, but rarely a lasting fix for the way their immune system attacks healthy cells. If the immune system is an army, then those with conditions like lupus, multiple sclerosis, or rheumatoid arthritis are often fighting a never-ending war of friendly fire.

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STAT

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Companies that are developing new medicines for autoimmune conditions, as well as other immune system disorders, have brought in more money and closed more deals so far this year than most other areas, including the cardiometabolic field, data from investment bank Oppenheimer show.

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STAT

MAY 8, 2024

Tolerance is the holy grail in calming autoimmune disease, a truce in the immune system’s faulty battle against the body’s own fabric. In type 1 diabetes, immune fighters attack beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone that controls glucose levels in the blood.

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STAT

JUNE 27, 2024

Supreme Court rejected a controversial bankruptcy deal in which the owners of Purdue Pharma sought to contribute up to $6 billion in exchange for immunity from further lawsuits. The immunity had been a huge sticking point and prevented the settlement, which was first approved by a bankruptcy judge three years ago, from being finalized.

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Immunity Immunization 361

STAT

AUGUST 21, 2023

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a Pfizer vaccine that aims to protect newborns against RSV by vaccinating pregnant people in the latter part of pregnancy. The vaccine, Abrysvo, has also been approved for use in adults 60 and older to protect them against respiratory syncytial virus. Read the rest…

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STAT

APRIL 4, 2024

Many of the effects of climate change play out at a very large scale: Heatwaves that grip entire continents. Flooding that submerges vast swaths of island nations and continental coastal areas. Other effects are far less visible because they’re taking place inside people’s bodies. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous.

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STAT

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Rheumatology — the study of immune-system-driven diseases of the bones, joints, muscles, and in-betweens — has inherited plenty of hand-me-downs from cancer research. For example, there are ways of squelching an immune system in order to shrink certain kinds of cancerous tumors.

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STAT

OCTOBER 19, 2022

The phrase “Black Death mass burial site” tends to evoke images of haphazard piles of diseased deceased like the “bring out your dead” Monty Python scene.

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STAT

MARCH 27, 2024

New research shows that certain bacteria can alter antibodies so much that they’re unrecognizable to the body’s defenses — potentially leading to immune friendly fire. The bacteria, called Akkermansia muciniphila, can strip the sugar coating from IgA antibodies, immune proteins abundant in the gut.

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STAT

MAY 22, 2024

Biogen is joining the industry’s fervor over immune and inflammatory disease drug development with a new acquisition. HI-Bio, which is based in San Francisco, is developing therapies for immune-mediated diseases like primary membranous nephropathy and IgA nephropathy, both of which impact kidney function. The Cambridge, Mass.,

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