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By Jennifer Jones, M.S.
When you think of antibody producing animals in the lab you probably think of rabbits, mice, goats, and rats. But what about llamas? Llamas probably aren’t the first animal, or even the fifth animal, that comes to mind when you think of antibody generation, but they’ve recently garnered a lot of attention for their potential to treat COVID-19 through neutralization of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.1 Additionally, they’ve shown potential in combatting other...
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By Emily Cartwright, PhD
Traumatic events, work demands, relationship conflicts, and health problems are all examples of psychological stressors that can result in physiological changes including increased cortisol and adrenaline levels. This change in gene expression manifests in physical symptoms such as increased heart rate, blood pressure, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, and insomnia. In addition to changing gene expression in the short term, psychological stress can impart lasting changes to your DNA by modifying the epigenome.
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By Victoria Osinski, PhD
Despite advances in the development of cancer immunotherapies, those specifically targeting tumors still remains limited. Currently, there is great interest in utilizing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies: a strategy that utilizes patients’ T cells and genetically engineers them to produce a T cell receptor to mount an attack against cancer cells. While CAR T cells can effectively kill cancer cells in tumors, they often come with off-tumor effects because these CARs’ target antigens are found endogenously in the body....
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By Hunter Martinez
The paradigm shifting view of the immune system being leveraged to target cancer has led to numerous therapeutic breakthroughs. One major cell group responsible for this revelation is a T cell. T cells functioning in fighting cancer can become tired or “exhausted”. T cell exhaustion is a state of cellular dysfunction resulting from repeated stimulation and chronic exposure to...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
What do nuts, dairy and red meat have in common? In addition to the fact that they are all edible, one of the answers is L-arginine. This amino acid improves T cell’s response against tumor cells, which typically have low concentration of L-arginine. Increasing L-arginine intra-tumorally, in turn, increases the effect of immunotherapy drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). To understand ICIs, consider two examples of...
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By Victoria Osinski, PhD
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
In the United States, 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.1 Despite the prevalence, cancer genesis is a mystery. The heterogeneity of cancers makes it difficult to study the precise mechanism of breast cancer development in vivo. Yet, research has shown that...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
The dorsal root ganglia (DRG) are a collection of cell bodies of sensory nerves carrying sensory information – including nociception, mechanoreception and proprioception – from peripheral nervous system (PNS) to the central nervous system (CNS). Degeneration of DRG, as observed in the autosomal recessive disease Friedreich ataxia (FRDA), manifests physiologically as impaired speech, difficulty walking, and loss of sensation in arms and legs. To mitigate FRDA, cell replacement therapy (CRT), such as...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Tissues within the human body are made of a three-dimensional (3D) arrangement of cells working together to perform vital functions. The commonly used 2D monolayer cultures have limited expandability and cell-cell communication, making them less relevant to human physiology. By contrast, in 3D cultures, such as spheroids or organoids, cells can easily permeate through the scaffold allowing the cells to stretch out and have...
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By Natalia Gurule, PhD
Historically, DNA repair pathways have been viewed from a tumor cell centric vantage point. Currently, the tumor microenvironment (TME) is recognized as having the potential to be a source of components that can participate in how a cancer cell responds to DNA damage. Within the TME, there are metabolites that can promote tumor cell growth and modulate immune cell...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Neurodegenerative disorders involve loss of function and, ultimately, death of neurons. Selective neuronal vulnerability has been observed in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For example, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 (SCA2) attack motor neurons, while Alzheimer’s disease (AD),...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
SARS-CoV-2 induces both humoral and cellular immunity. A vaccine or natural infection invokes SARS-CoV-2-specific humoral components (antibodies from activated B cells) and cellular response (CD4+, CD8+ T cells) that can protect against subsequent infections. Following SARS-CoV-2 infection, the levels of...
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By Victoria Osinski, PhD
An exciting new study by Casasola-LaMacchia et al. was published earlier this year presenting a novel mass spectrometry method for detecting different MHC class...
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By Victoria Osinski
Pyroptosis is an inflammatory form of programmed cell death characterized by the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18.1,10 It is a process distinct from apoptosis and necrosis (Table 1) and has been observed in the setting of multiple diseases including, but...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Humans rely on the pancreas for digesting food and generating energy from it. SARS-CoV-2-mediated damage to the exocrine pancreas is evident from the pancreatitis, pancreatic enlargement, and abnormal levels of digestive enzymes in severe COVID-19. Likewise, increased propensity for hyperglycemia,...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Cholesterol is an essential part of animal cell membranes. Cholesterol-rich lipid rafts maintain the fluidity and protein trafficking of plasma membranes. Cellular ABCA1 protein moves cholesterol and certain fats outside of the cell. Dysregulated lipid rafts and cholesterol metabolism...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein is the main target of COVID-19 vaccines. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are RNA-based vaccines while...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Vaccination generates protective adaptive immune memory without the need for an actual viral infection. COVID-19 vaccines help recognize and fight off SARS-CoV-2 infection. In December 2020, US-FDA approved mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Hippo signaling pathway may be regarded as a master regulator of organ growth. Hippo pathway is a sensor for cellular and tissue integrity that does not seem to have dedicated extracellular ligands or receptors. The downstream effectors of Hippo serine/threonine kinase signaling are two structurally and functionally similar proteins, Yap1 and Taz. These two proteins are transcriptional co-activators, which means that they themselves are unable to bind to the...
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By Emily Cartwright, PhD
When it's late in the afternoon and you smell a delicious bag of popcorn in the microwave, your mouth begins to water and your stomach starts to grumble. These behaviors are a result of communication between your enteric nervous system (ENS) and brain. The ENS is an arm of the peripheral nervous system and is critically important for function of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, controlling everything from salivation to excretion. Dysfunction of the ENS leads to...
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By Victoria Osinski
Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) recognize and respond to Pattern- and Damage-associated molecular patterns (PAMP and DAMPs) in a number of different cell types. The PRR family can be broken down into sub-families of receptors (Table 1). While first identified in the context of infection, these receptors and signaling pathways are involved in many disease contexts including ischemia, cancer, atherosclerosis, and autoimmunity.2,16,18 Broadly, PRR signaling can regulate cell death...
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By Victoria Osinski
The outbreak of COVID-19 resulting from the transmission of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in many cases of illness typically manifesting in minor to severe respiratory symptoms. However, additional cardiovascular complications have been observed in a subset of patients as well, prompting further inquiry into the mechanisms of infection and response to SARS-CoV-2. While advancements have been made into answering these questions, it is still...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
The cellular recycling process known as autophagy is currently being targeted in over 60 clinical trials focused on treating different types of cancer1. To date, the only autophagy-targeted agents used in patients are late stage autophagy inhibitors that target the lysosome, including chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Over the...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
There is good news and bad news related to COVID-19, a disease caused by SARS-COV-2 infection. Good news first: the vast majority of otherwise healthy individuals remain asymptomatic. The bad news though is that even the asymptomatic population is at risk for COVID-19-related brain damage called NeuroCOVID. The neurological manifestations related to COVID-19 may be less severe and less frequent in milder cases as compared to the hospitalized patients. This article will outline the mechanism behind NeuroCOVID and COVID-19-related neuropsychological...
