Featured series 
Tag: Immunology
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Health
App predicts hospital capacity
Harvard’s Global Health Institute puts its research expertise into motion, helping hospitals assess capacity and quality of care so they can prepare for COVID-19 patients appropriately.
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Campus & Community
Still wrestling with big questions
Harvard biochemistry professor Jack Strominger is still working in his lab at 94 years old. He will retire and become emeritus in July.
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Science & Tech
A shot in the arm for vaccine research
Immunology research at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard has advanced an HIV vaccine into the clinic, and will diversify thanks to a major gift from Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon.
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Science & Tech
A silly-sounding prize for some serious science
Harvard-trained researchers win Golden Goose Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Health
Streamlining care through electronic consultations
Mass. General researchers have found that electronic consultations in allergy and immunology can simplify the process of providing the most appropriate care, often reducing the need for in-person specialist visits.
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Health
Toward safer bone-marrow transplants
The combination of the antibody CD117 and the drug saporin selectively targets blood stem cells, making transplantation safer by limiting collateral damage caused by the current standard of treatment, chemotherapy, and radiation.
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Health
Epidemic of autoimmune diseases calls for action
Scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute are seeking ways to protect newly transplanted cells from autoimmune attack.
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Campus & Community
Flier to step down as Medical School dean
Jeffrey S. Flier will step down as dean of Harvard Medical School next July and return to teaching following a sabbatical year in 2016-17.
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Health
Initiative challenges drug crisis
Taking aim at the alarming slowdown in the development of new and lifesaving drugs, Harvard Medical School is launching the Initiative in Systems Pharmacology, a comprehensive strategy to transform drug discovery by convening biologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicists, computer scientists, and clinicians to explore together how drugs work in complex systems.
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Health
New insights into the mystery of natural HIV immunity
When people become infected by HIV, it’s usually only a matter of time, barring drug intervention, until they develop full-blown AIDS. However, a small number of people exposed to the virus progress very…
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Science & Tech
Faust calls global health one of her main priorities
Declaring the University’s efforts to improve the state of global health knowledge, education, and capacity building to be one of her “very highest priorities” as president of Harvard, Drew Faust today (May 18) announced the appointment of Sue J. Goldie, Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health and director of the Center for Health Decision…
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Health
Bone marrow stem cells may help control inflammatory bowel disease
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School investigators have found that infusions of a particular bone marrow stem cell appeared to protect gastrointestinal tissue from autoimmune attack in a mouse model.
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Health
Initial human trial of Type 1 diabetes treatment begun
Scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have initiated a phase 1 clinical trial to reverse type 1 diabetes. The trial is exploring whether the promising results from the laboratory…
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Health
Blood stem cells fight invaders
No other stem cell is more thoroughly understood than the blood, or hematopoietic, stem cell. These occasional and rare cells, scattered sparingly throughout the marrow and capable of replenishing an…
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Health
Pursuing a cholera vaccine
The reports from Dhaka are hopeful. It is 2005, and Dr. Firdausi Qadri and colleagues at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, are testing a new cholera vaccine…
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Campus & Community
Key antibody IgG links cells’ capture and disposal of germs
Scientists have found a new task managed by the antibody that’s the workhorse of the human immune system: Inside cells, immunoglobulin G (IgG) helps bring together the phagosomes that corral…
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Campus & Community
Cells that work themselves to death
When you’re fighting flu or any other infection, your body mobilizes battalions of cells to defend against the invading viruses or bacteria. But once the invaders have been defeated and…
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Health
How gold and other medicinal metals function against rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases
Gold compounds have been used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases for more than 75 years, but until now, how the metals work has been a…
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Health
Bacterium proves essential to immune system development
In the July 15, 2005 Cell, a team led by Dennis Kasper, the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of microbiology and molecular…
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Health
Novel combination overcomes drug-resistant multiple myeloma cells
The researchers hope to move rapidly to clinical trials of the therapy, a combination of the drug Velcade and an experimental compound that was designed by researchers at the Broad…
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Health
TB gene identified
As many as one out of three people in the world are infected with the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, public health experts estimate. That could lead to a global plague…
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Health
Broken hearts may mend after all
Although adult muscle cells become inflexible after differentiation, these cells temporarily loosen the structure to divide in fetal development. Mark T. Keating found that in some lower vertebrates, heart tissue…
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Health
T cell misfits may spell autoimmunity
For a would-be T cell, the journey from cradle to grave is likely to be brief. After leaving the bone marrow, the immature immune cell travels directly to the thymus,…
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Health
TB susceptibility gene identified
As many as one out of three people in the world are infected with the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, public health experts estimate. That could lead to a global plague…
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Health
New findings about protection against pneumococcal disease
Before the advent of the pneumococcal vaccine, known as Prevnar, S. pneumoniae caused millions of ear infections each year, half a million episodes of bacterial pneumonia, and life- threatening cases…
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Health
Joslin Diabetes Center scientists find genetic defects in immunological tolerance
The genetic defect keeps the body from properly dealing with “errant” immune cells that it normally eliminates by a process called immunological tolerance. These immune cells then attack the insulin-producing…
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Health
Innate signal sparks homing of T cells
The results of three studies published together in the Aug. 31, 2003 online edition of Nature Immunology help explain the uncanny ability of T cells to home to problem areas…
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Health
Bacterial construct makes for elegant vaccine
Investigators from Harvard Medical School and London’s Hammersmith Hospital have found a way to use the bacterium Listeria along with Escherichia coli to fight disease instead of causing it. In…
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Health
AIDS vaccine trials underway
A new AIDS vaccine is being tested in Boston, according to senior investigator Clyde Crumpacker, infectious disease specialist in the Virology Research Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)…