They were right. Last week, writing in Science, a Japanese team reported a formula that transforms human blood cells into immature eggs. With the help of an artificial womb made from mouse ovary cells, the human cells underwent changes to their DNA that mimics those in a 10-week-old, normal human egg.

The resulting eggs are far from full-blown eggs, and they can’t yet be fertilized to create human embryos.

But “this cannot be denied as a spectacular next step,” said Dr. Eli Adashi at Brown University, who was not involved in the study. “Considering how difficult this has been in a human, [this new study] in a way broke the ice.”

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Not sure about this, microbiome is known to be quite stable and to revert back to some kind of base line…even after faecal swaps… Curious what that could mean over time.

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By Clare Wilson

The key to organ transplants might lie in an unexpected place – the gut. Giving mice a faecal transplant made them more tolerant of a subsequent heart transplant.

The explanation could be that bacteria in the bowel help regulate the immune system and stop it from launching an attack against the unfamiliar transplanted tissue. Finding the mechanism could lead to new medicines to stop organ rejection, says Jonathan Bromberg at the University of Maryland. “It’s a way to turn down the volume knob on the immune system.”

Two-thirds of all cancers are caused by DNA replication errors, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. But don’t light a celebratory cigarette just yet.

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Is the lifespan today longer than in ancient times, an interesting article.

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The wonders of modern medicine and nutrition make it easy to believe we enjoy longer lives than at any time in human history, but we may not be that special after all.

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A new discovery might make immunotherapy applicable to more patients.

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Led by Dr. Alicja Copik, scientists at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine have discovered that it might be possible to make cancer immunotherapy work for a larger portion of patients by employing PM21-activated natural killer (PM21-NK) cells [1].

Study abstract

Anti-PD-1/anti-PD-L1 therapies have shown success in cancer treatment but responses are limited to ~ 15% of patients with lymphocyte infiltrated, PD-L1 positive tumors. Hence, strategies that increase PD-L1 expression and tumor infiltration should make more patients eligible for PD-1/PD-L1 blockade therapy, thus improving overall outcomes. PD-L1 expression on tumors is induced by IFNγ, a cytokine secreted by NK cells. Therefore, we tested if PM21-particle expanded NK cells (PM21-NK cells) induced expression of PD-L1 on tumors and if anti-PD-L1 treatment enhanced NK cell anti-tumor efficacy in an ovarian cancer model. Studies here showed that PM21-NK cells secrete high amounts of IFNγ and that adoptively transferred PM21-NK cells induce PD-L1 expression on SKOV-3 cells in vivo. The induction of PD-L1 expression on SKOV-3 cells coincided with the presence of regulatory T cells (Tregs) in the abdominal cavity and within tumors.