High levels of immunoglobulin E antibodies in microbiomes of people with peanut allergies

A team of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has found that people with peanut allergies have an abundance of allergy-causing immunoglobulin E antibodies (IgE) in their guts. In their paper published in the journal Science Immunology, the group describes sequencing antibody genes from B-lineage plasma cells collected from multiple body locations in people with peanut allergies and what they found. Duane Wesemann and Cathryn Nagler with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago, respectively, have published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.
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Gut bacteria can penetrate tumors and aid cancer therapy, study suggests

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and University of Chicago have discovered that bacteria that usually live in the gut can accumulate in tumors and improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy in mice. The study, which will be published March 6 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), suggests that treating cancer patients with Bifidobacteria might boost their response to CD47 immunotherapy, a wide-ranging anti-cancer treatment that is currently being evaluated in several clinical trials.
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Coronavirus and the Black Death: We haven’t learned from our past

Although some media outlets have begun referring to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus as a “modern plague”, the threat of COVID-19 remains negligible compared with historic outbreaks of plague. The latest World Health Organization report puts the coronavirus death toll at just over 3,000 globally, whereas the Black Death was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 30-50% of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century. The most disturbing similarity between the two lies not in the diseases themselves but in their social consequences. Then, as now, outbreaks were blamed on certain ethnic groups.
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