The Week Magazine – Scientists have been busy researching a dizzying series of developments that are now being reported as major discoveries and achievements.
1. Finding the root cause of lupus
A study published in the journal Nature points to abnormalities in the immune system of lupus patients that is caused by a molecular abnormality.
“What we found was this fundamental imbalance in the types of T cells that patients with lupus make,” Deepak Rao, one of the study authors, said to NBC News. Specifically, “people with lupus have too much of a particular T cell associated with damage in healthy cells and too little of another T cell associated with repair,” NBC News said.
The good news is that this could be reversed.
“The study found that giving people with lupus anifrolumab, a drug that blocks interferon, prevented the T-cell imbalance that likely leads to the disease,” said NBC News.
2. Restoring brain cells
A study published in the journal Nature found that a drug called antisense oligonucleotide allowed human neurons to develop normally despite carrying a mutation due to a genetic disorder called Timothy syndrome.
Timothy syndrome is caused by a mutation of a single gene in a person’s DNA. The new drug develops an “antisense nucleotide, a small piece of synthetic genetic material that alters the proteins made by a cell,” said NPR.
3. Cell therapy for melanoma
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first cellular therapy for aggressive forms of melanoma. The treatment, called Amtagvi, is “designed to fight off advanced forms of melanoma by extracting and replicating T cells derived from a patient’s tumor,” said NPR.
These cells are also called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). T cells are integral in the immune system but can become “dysfunctional inside tumors” …
