Despite the success of global vaccination campaigns, vaccine access in low-resource settings is an ongoing challenge. Subunit vaccines are a well-established and clinically scalable intervention, yet they have achieved limited success for poorly immunogenic antigens such as those associated with SARS-CoV-2. Delivery strategies that promote gradual release of subunit vaccines from the injection site offer the potential to improve humoral immunity by enhancing lymph node exposure, however, clinical implementation of this strategy is challenging due to poor scalability and high costs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCellular hitchhiking is an emerging strategy for the control of adoptively transferred immune cells. Hitchhiking approaches are primarily mediated by adhesion of nano and microparticles to the cell membrane, which conveys an ability to modulate transferred cells local drug delivery. Although T cell therapies employing this strategy have progressed into the clinic, phagocytic cells including dendritic cells (DCs) are much more challenging to engineer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the zebrafish lateral line, non-sensory supporting cells readily re-enter the cell cycle to generate new hair cells and supporting cells during homeostatic maintenance and following damage to hair cells. This contrasts with supporting cells from mammalian vestibular and auditory sensory epithelia which rarely re-enter the cell cycle, and hence loss of hair cells results in permanent sensory deficit. Lateral line supporting cells are derived from multipotent progenitor cells that migrate down the trunk midline as a primordium and are deposited to differentiate into a neuromast.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn species with large and complex genomes such as conifers, dense linkage maps are a useful resource for supporting genome assembly and laying the genomic groundwork at the structural, populational, and functional levels. However, most of the 600+ extant conifer species still lack extensive genotyping resources, which hampers the development of high-density linkage maps. In this study, we developed a linkage map relying on 21,570 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers in Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis [Bong.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVaccines are an important tool in the rapidly evolving repertoire of immunotherapies in oncology. Although cancer vaccines have been investigated for over 30 years, very few have achieved meaningful clinical success. However, recent advances in areas such antigen identification, formulation development and manufacturing, combination therapy regimens, and indication and patient selection hold promise to reinvigorate the field.
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