This review examines how CAR-T cell therapy is expanding beyond blood cancers into solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, chronic viral infections, and next-generation immune-cell platforms. It highlights promising engineering advances, including universal CAR-T cells, in vivo delivery, CAR-NK cells, and safety switches, while emphasizing unresolved challenges in durability, safety, scalability, and global access.
Anyone who has ever used a microscope knows that it takes time to bring a sample into sharp focus. Each time you move the slide, the image blurs, and you have to stop and carefully turn a knob to bring everything back into clear view. For scientists and clinicians, even if the motion is semi-automated, that time quickly adds up as they work with dozens or hundreds of samples.
Now a team of scientists at Caltech has developed an inexpensive, robust fix for this problem that involves little more than a couple of LED lights and some physics-based processing. They describe the new autofocus technique, which they call Digital Defocus Aberration Interference (DAbI), in a paper published in Nature Communications.
The lead authors of the paper are graduate students Haowen Zhou, Ph.D., and Shi “Josh” Zhao, who completed the work in the lab of Changhuei Yang, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering at Caltech and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia have uncovered a hidden property of light that allows it to twist, spin and behave differently—without mirrors, materials or special lenses. In a breakthrough that could transform medical testing, data transmission and future quantum technologies, researchers from the UK and South Africa have shown that light can be “programmed” simply by exploiting its natural geometry.
The discovery overturns decades of scientific thinking and reveals that light can develop chiral behavior—meaning it can act like a left or right hand—while traveling freely through space. This, the team says, could ultimately lead to a world where light carries information, probes biology, manipulates matter and protects quantum signals. The research is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.
New in JBC press.
Lipotoxicity caused β-cell mass decrease and impaired β-cell function in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). We previously reported that caveolin-1 (Cav-1) deficiency protected pancreatic β cells against palmitate (PA)-induced apoptosis and dysfunction in both NIT-1 cells and isolated islets. In this study, we firstly established inducible β-cell-specific Cav-1 knockout (iβ-Cav1 KO) mice model. Next, we investigated whether Cav-1 depletion in vitro or in vivo affected β-cell function and survival through the regulation of autophagy under lipotoxicity.
Combining AI with quantum computing could enable doctors and researchers to analyze the human body at an unprecedented molecular level, unlocking breakthroughs in personalized medicine. Yet significant quantum technology hurdles remain before this vision becomes reality.
https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI200062 Here, Tiffany C. Scharschmidt & team report on the early life window for immune tolerance using human samples, finding naïve CD4+ T cells in cord blood have distinct metabolic traits that enable their regulatory potential.
The schematic shows mass cytometry metabolic markers in their corresponding pathways.
Address correspondence to: Tiffany C. Scharschmidt, 1701 Divisadero Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, California 94,115, USA. Phone: 415.476.1696; Email: [email protected].
Our immune systems never stop targeting cells they regard as a threat, so it’s really bad news when rogue immune cells mistakenly turn on us, as they do in autoimmune conditions. Existing treatments suppress these attacks, but don’t stop them. But a new approach that addresses the cause of these disorders by killing off the rogue cells is proving wildly successful.
“All the big pharma companies are jumping on the bandwagon now,” says Reuben Benjamin at King’s College London. There are dozens of clinical trials under way around the world, and the first treatments could be approved as early as next year, he says, as they’re proving to be vastly superior to those currently used.
The key to these new treatments are genetically engineered cells known as CAR T-cells. These are made from the T-cells that your immune system usually employs to kill off invasive bacteria or virus-infected cells. The T-cells are extracted from a person, programmed to attack a specific kind of cell and then returned to that individual.
Image: Location South/Alamy
A revolutionary cancer treatment is now being applied to a wide range of autoimmune disorders. Columnist Michael Le Page finds it is proving to be even more effective than expected.
Fu et al. use Ig-humanized mice expressing the germline CR3022 heavy chain to reveal how somatic hypermutation rapidly adapts this antibody class for broad sarbecovirus recognition. Sequential immunization drives CR3022-like maturation, while structural analyses show that increased affinity and breadth arise from subtle polar and electrostatic refinements.
Today thanks to progress in medicine and science our generation may live longer than any previous one. There wasn’t better time to start taking care of our health than today. Future is amazing. To participate in it we must to take care of our health today.