Forbes reporter Katie Jennings spotlights Phillip (Terry) Ragon '72, and his philanthropic efforts focused on curing HIV. “Ragon’s approach has been to bring together scientists who don’t typically collaborate, including doctors, engineers, physicists, mathematicians and virologists,” writes Jennings.
MIT researchers have developed new technology that allows vaccines to be directly inserted into the lymph nodes to target two of the most common mutations in the KRAS gene, which cause roughly one third of all cancers, reports Jaimie Seaton for Scientific American. “The team modified the small vaccine components to include a fatty acid, which enables the vaccine to effectively hitch a ride on albumin, a common protein found throughout the body,” explains Seaton. “Albumin serves as a molecular shuttle bus, with pockets on its surface where fatty acids can bind to it.”
Prof. Bruce Walker and his team have found that CD8+ T cells can allow HIV patients to control the virus without the use of medications, reports Alan Mozes for HealthDay. “About one in 300 people are able to control HIV without the need for medications,” says Walker. “[It appears] that it is the CD8+ T cell response that achieves this control.”
Researchers from MIT and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology have found a vaccine ingredient that may strengthen immune response, reports Natalie Colarossi for Newsweek. This combination-style vaccine ingredient “may boost the effectiveness of inoculations ranging from HIV to Covid-19,” writes Colarossi.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Bruce Walker, director of the Ragon Institute, and his colleagues on the executive committee of the Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR) underscore the importance of scientific collaboration. “The MassCPR model serves as a road map for building a global Apollo-like project that brings together governmental and nongovernmental entities, academic institutions, industry, and philanthropists to ensure the generation of knowledge, the sharing of data, and the equitable distribution of resources across the globe in preparation for the next pandemic,” they write. “Collaboration is the antidote to even the most virulent future threats.”
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, spotlights new research by Galit Alter of the Ragon Institute of MIT and Harvard. Alter and her colleagues found that “the antibody responses in kids and adults with mild Covid-19 are quite similar. However, the complications seen in kids with MIS-C and adults with severe Covid-19 appear to be driven by two distinctly different types of antibodies involved in different aspects of the immune response.”