Vaccination

A new type of RNA could enhance vaccines and cancer treatments

It all started in the lab. Two Boston University doctoral students, Joshua McGee and Jack Kirsch, were creating and testing different types of RNA—strands of ribonucleic acid, built from chains of chemical compounds called ...

Oncology & Cancer

Discovery of a new tumor cell type in childhood cancer

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have made a significant breakthrough in the study of childhood neuroblastoma, a type of cancer that begins before birth during the early stages of adrenal gland development.

Oncology & Cancer

New precision tools make quick work of tumor dissection

As fascinating as it is to work in a modern biology lab, in many cases a lot of repetitive, detailed work is necessary before the research can start. For example, cancer researchers are now capable of using hundreds or even ...

Oncology & Cancer

How the scars of demolished brain tumors seed relapse

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has discovered that recurrent tumors of the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) grow out of the fibrous scars of malignant predecessors destroyed by interventions such as radiotherapy, ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Discovery could help treat fatal, drug-resistant pneumonia and sepsis

Bacterial pneumonia and sepsis are leading causes of hospitalization and death. Researchers in Kansas State University's Division of Biology have discovered that dysfunction of the body's immune response to bacterial infection ...

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Immunity (medical)

Immunity is a biological term that describes a state of having sufficient biological defenses to avoid infection, disease, or other unwanted biological invasion. Immunity involves both specific and non-specific components. The non-specific components act either as barriers or as eliminators of wide range of pathogens irrespective of antigenic specificity. Other components of the immune system adapt themselves to each new disease encountered and are able to generate pathogen-specific immunity.

Adaptive immunity is often sub-divided into two major types depending on how the immunity was introduced. Naturally acquired immunity occurs through contact with a disease causing agent, when the contact was not deliberate, whereas artificially acquired immunity develops only through deliberate actions such as vaccination. Both naturally and artificially acquired immunity can be further subdivided depending on whether immunity is induced in the host or passively transferred from a immune host. Passive immunity is acquired through transfer of antibodies or activated T-cells from an immune host, and is short lived, usually lasts only a few months, whereas active immunity is induced in the host itself by antigen, and lasts much longer, sometimes life-long. The diagram below summarizes these divisions of immunity.

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