A highly personalized approach could help the body’s immune cells better recognize melanoma (the most dangerous type of skin cancer) and kill it, according to an Israeli study published in Cancer Discovery. Today’s immunotherapies involve administering antibodies to unlock the natural immune T cells that recognize and kill cancer cells; or growing and reactivating these T cells outside the body and returning them in a “weaponized” form.
September 24, 2018
What is the Weizmann Institute doing to fight prostate and ovarian cancer? Quite a bit.
September 2018
Our genetic material – DNA – is under constant assault. It is damaged every day by external forces like sunlight, radiation, tobacco smoke, air pollution, and food additives, and internal ones like waste products left over from the body’s metabolic processes.
With new immunotherapy treatments for melanoma, recovery rates have risen dramatically – in some cases to around 50%. But they could be much higher. A new study led by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science showed, in lab dishes and animal studies, that a highly personalized approach could help the immune cells improve their ability to recognize the cancer and kill it. The results of this study were published in Cancer Discovery.
September 12, 2018
Every day, millions of people take probiotics – preparations containing live bacteria that are meant to fortify their immune systems, prevent disease, or repair the adverse effects of antibiotics. Yet the benefits of probiotics have not really been medically proven. It is not even clear if probiotic bacteria really colonize the digestive tract or, if they do, what effects the colonies have on humans and their microbiomes – the native bacteria in their guts. Now, in two back-to-back reports published in Cell, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science show – in both mice and in humans – that a preparation of 11 strains of the most widely used probiotic families may sometimes be less than beneficial for the user and their microbiome.
September 06, 2018
Probiotics, hailed by some as a cure for all kinds of digestive ailments and recommended by many GPs alongside antibiotics, may not be as universally beneficial for gut health as previously thought. The gut microbiome is the sum total of all the micro-organisms living in a person’s gut, and has been shown to play a huge role in human health. New research has found probiotics – usually taken as supplements or in foods such as yoghurt, kimchi or kefir – can hinder a patient’s gut microbiome from returning to normal after a course of antibiotics, and that different people respond to probiotics in dramatically different ways.
September 06, 2018
Probiotics are packed into all sorts of pills and products promising to keep our guts healthy. But not only do most of the bugs not stick around in our bodies, they could, in fact, be harming us, researchers believe. As many as 3.9 million adults in the U.S. take prebiotic or probiotic supplements, according to recent estimates cited by the authors of two studies published back-to-back in the journal Cell. Users pop the pills in the hope of easing everything from gastrointestinal problems to fortifying the immune system, defending against infectious disease and preventing cardiovascular disease.
September 06, 2018
The quantum computers of the future will be able to perform computations that cannot be done on today’s computers. These may likely include the ability to crack the encryption that is currently used for secure electronic transactions, as well as the means to efficiently solve unwieldy problems in which the number of possible solutions increases exponentially. Research in the quantum optics lab of Prof. Barak Dayan at the Weizmann Institute of Science may be bringing such computers one step closer by providing the “quantum gates” required for communication within and between such quantum computers.
September 04, 2018
Last October, Aviv Regev spoke to a gathering of international scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. For Regev, a computational and systems biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the gathering was also a homecoming of sorts. Regev earned her PhD from nearby Tel Aviv University in 2002. Now, 15 years later, she was back to discuss one of the most ambitious projects in the history of biology.
August 22, 2018
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