Adventures from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
The human immune system is composed of a diverse array of cells, which collectively work to exterminate pathogenic entities in the body. Yet this system is able to recognize host, or self, tissues as “friendly” through a variety of so-called immune checkpoint signals. Many cancer types — including melanomas and breast cancers — exploit this(...)
Kaitlyn Sadtler, a freshly minted Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins’ Cell and Molecular Medicine Graduate Program and Jennifer Elisseeff, Ph.D., recently had her thesis work published in Science, where she demonstrated the necessity of the adaptive immune system in fostering a pro-healing response following biomaterial implantation to provide scaffolding for cell growth and tissue repair. Extracellular(...)
What do faulty brakes on a car and cancer cells have in common? For one, cancer cells have found ways to evade checkpoints that the body’s cells use as brakes to stop them from dividing out of control. By this same analogy, the accelerator in a cancer cell is always pushed to the floor, and(...)