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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 20, 2025 at 8:56am

How HPV reprograms immune cells to help cancer grow

The most common cancer-causing strain of human papillomavirus (HPV), HPV16, undermines the body's defenses by reprogramming immune cells surrounding the tumor, according to new research.

In mice, blocking this process boosted the ability of experimental treatments for HPV to eliminate cancer cells. The results were published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.

HPV16 causes more than half of cervical cancer cases and roughly 90% of HPV-linked throat cancers. It can be neutralized with the preventive vaccine Gardasil-9, but only if vaccination occurs prior to HPV exposure.

Researchers are now working to develop "therapeutic vaccines," which can be taken after HPV exposure—for instance, following an abnormal pap smear or cancer diagnosis—to trigger an immune response against infected cells by T-cells, a type of "fighter" cell that helps defend the body from disease. But these vaccines, now in clinical trials, have limited effectiveness—and the new study helps explain why.

The research focuses on a signalling protein in the immune system with inflammatory properties called Interleukin-23 or IL-23. While IL-23 was previously implicated in cervical and throat cancers, its exact role was unclear.

In a series of tests in mice and cell cultures,  researchers found that two HPV proteins, E6 and E7, prompt nearby cells to release IL-23, which in turn prevents the body's T-cells from attacking the tumor.

In order to eliminate the cancer, T-cells need to proliferate and destroy infected cells. But IL-23 stops them from working effectively, so the tumor keeps growing.

HPV16 E6 and E7 expressing cancer cells suppress the anti-tumor immune response by upregulating KLF2 mediated IL-23 expression in macrophages, Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (2025). DOI: 10.1136/jitc-2025-011915

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 20, 2025 at 8:49am

Maize plants use a volatile gas to fight off pests in densely crowded fields

When maize fields become too crowded, the plants signal each other to boost their defenses. A research team found that in crowded conditions, maize plants release a volatile gas called linalool into the air. When it reaches neighboring plants, the gas triggers a defensive response in their roots.

While planting crops close together can increase harvest size, it also increases the risk of pathogens and pests such as caterpillars and the African maize stalk borer. When this happens, maize crops don't stand idly by. It was already known that the plants can change their shape in crowded conditions, such as growing taller to get more sunlight, but less was known about their immune response.

The research team reports that in dense fields, linalool acts like an alarm bell, triggering the roots of neighboring plants to increase production of jasmonate and other plant hormones. This, in turn, leads to more benzoxazinoids leaking into the soil around the roots.

This class of plant chemical defense compounds alters the bacterial composition of the soil, thereby protecting the plants from pests. And the protective response is a speedy one, with increased defense against caterpillars observed after just three days of growth in high-density conditions.

However, as the researchers note from their field studies, there is a catch. This defensive boost comes at the cost of reduced growth as the plants put more of their resources into defense rather than growing.

The scientists also showed that soil modified by densely planted maize crops offered ongoing protection for new crops even against different pests. Later plantings were protected from nematodes and other pathogens, not just insects. This suggests that maize defense readiness persists in the soil long after the initial crop is harvested.

Dongsheng Guo et al, Linalool-triggered plant-soil feedback drives defense adaptation in dense maize plantings, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adv6675

Niklas Schandry et al, The scent of a crowd, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adz7633

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 1:45pm

Early lead exposure could result in memory issues later in life

A new study has found that people who lived in areas with high levels of leaded gasoline emissions in the 1960s and '70s are more likely to report memory problems today—a finding that researchers say could deepen our understanding of environmental risks tied to dementia.

The study and others presented in July at the 2025 Alzheimer's Association International Conference used data from more than 600,000 participants .

Participants who lived in areas with higher estimated lead emissions—often tied to dense traffic and industrial zones—were significantly more likely to report poor memory. 

Lead has long been known to affect brain development in children. But research into its long-term effects on aging brains is still emerging.

Lead is bad for lots of things. There's been some studies that suggest it's related to IQ generally, and also aggression and lots of other things in animal model studies.

IQ is not the only area where lead exposure damages us. Instead, it often overlaps with other social determinants of health, like poverty and poor housing, making it difficult to isolate one factor. Higher levels of exposure and living near environmental pollutants often correlate to those with lower incomes.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 1:39pm

How a Brain Implant and AI Gave a Woman with Paralysis Her Voice Back

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 1:24pm

Vaccines trigger rapid lymph node responses, researchers discover

Lymph nodes are a key part of the human immune system, whose primary function is to combat infections. The effectiveness of vaccines is based on their ability to trigger events in lymph nodes that lead to the development of an immune response that protects the host against pathogens.

Researchers observed that lymphatic endothelial cells and other stromal cells are the first cells in the lymph nodes to come into contact with vaccines. The vaccines induced several changes in stromal cells at the gene and protein levels within the first hours of vaccination, which in turn affected lymph node function.

The changes in the stromal cells were observed before the development of the protective immune response triggered by the vaccine.

The researchers also discovered that different vaccines activate lymph node stromal cells in different ways.  

Ruth Fair-Mäkelä et al, COVID-19 vaccine type controls stromal reprogramming in draining lymph nodes, Science Immunology (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.adr6787

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 1:21pm

How AI support can go wrong in safety-critical settings

When it comes to adopting artificial intelligence in high-stakes settings like hospitals and airplanes, good AI performance and brief worker training on the technology is not sufficient to ensure systems will run smoothly and patients and passengers will be safe, a new study suggests.

Instead, algorithms and the people who use them in the most safety-critical organizations must be evaluated simultaneously to get an accurate view of AI's effects on human decision making, researchers say.

The team also contends these evaluations should assess how people respond to good, mediocre and poor technology performance to put the AI-human interaction to a meaningful test—and to expose the level of risk linked to mistakes.

During tests, results showed that more accurate AI predictions about whether or not a patient was trending toward a medical emergency improved participant performance by between 50% and 60%. But when the algorithm produced an inaccurate prediction, even when accompanied by explanatory data that didn't support that outcome, human performance collapsed, with an over 100% degradation in proper decision making when the algorithm was the most wrong.

An AI algorithm can never be perfect. So if you want an AI algorithm that's ready for safety-critical systems, that means something about the team, about the people and AI together, has to be able to cope with a poor-performing AI algorithm.

The point is this is not about making really good safety-critical system technology. It's the joint human-machine capabilities that matter in a safety-critical system

While the overall results provided evidence that there is a need for this type of evaluation, the researchers said they were surprised that explanations included in some experimental conditions had very little sway in participant concern—instead, the algorithm recommendation, presented in a solid red bar, overruled everything else.

Whatever effect that those annotations had was roundly overwhelmed by the presence of that indicator that swept everything else away.

Dane A. Morey et al, Empirically derived evaluation requirements for responsible deployments of AI in safety-critical settings, npj Digital Medicine (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41746-025-01784-y

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 12:53pm

Brain abnormalities seen in children exposed prenatally to widely used pesticide

A new study reports evidence of a link between prenatal exposure to the widely used insecticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) and structural abnormalities in the brain and poorer motor function in  children and adolescents.

The findings are the first to demonstrate enduring and widespread molecular, cellular, and metabolic effects in the brain, as well as poorer fine motor control among youth with prenatal exposure to the insecticide.

Progressively higher insecticide exposure levels were significantly associated with progressively greater alterations in brain structure, function, and metabolism, as well as poorer measures of motor speed and motor programming. Links between higher CPF and greater anomalies across different neuroimaging measures suggest that prenatal exposure produces enduring disturbances in brain structure, function, and metabolism in direct proportion to the level of exposure.

Residential use was the primary source of CPF exposure in this cohort. Although the EPA banned indoor residential use in 2001, agricultural use continues for non-organic fruits, vegetables, and grains, contributing to toxic exposures carried by outdoor air and dust near agricultural areas.

Current widespread exposures, at levels comparable to those experienced in this sample, continue to place farm workers, pregnant women, and unborn children in harm's way.

The disturbances in brain tissue and metabolism that we observed with prenatal exposure to this one pesticide were remarkably widespread throughout the brain. Other organophosphate pesticides likely produce similar effects, warranting caution to minimize exposures in pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood, when brain development is rapid and especially vulnerable to these toxic chemicals, say the researchers.

Brain Abnormalities in Children Exposed Prenatally to the Pesticide Chlorpyrifos, JAMA Neurology (2025). DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2025.2818

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 12:37pm

Wild birds switch from sound to sight communication in noisy  environments

As anyone who has tried to hold a conversation in a noisy room knows, it is sometimes easier to rely on hand gestures than to shout over the din. White-throated dippers face a similar challenge along the fast-flowing streams they inhabit, where the roar of fast-flowing waters can sometimes drown out their melodic songs. Rather than trying to out-sing the river to defend territory or attract mates, these plump, endearing birds sometimes switch strategy entirely—turning to sight instead of sound, by flashing their bright white eyelids in a striking visual display.

A new study led by researchers is among the first to document this kind of sensory shift in a wild bird. The findings shed light on how dippers adapt their communication depending on social and environmental cues—and how such flexibility may have evolved in response to noise.

Evolution shaped by river noise Using more than one sense to communicate can be a big advantage in noisy environments. However, while many animals are known to adapt within a single sense—for example, by singing louder, changing pitch, or repeating themselves—clear evidence of animals switching between senses to send messages, like moving from sound to sight, or touch to smell, is still surprisingly rare. The white-throated dipper made an ideal test case: it lives year-round beside fast-flowing rivers, where background noise is often high, and it has bright white eyelids that can act as a visual signal. If any species had learned to shift between senses to get its message across, the researchers reasoned, the dipper would be a great candidate.

The study sheds light not just on how dippers communicate, but on how environmental challenges—like noisy rivers—can shape the evolution of signaling.

 Léna de Framond et al, Stream noise induces song plasticity and a shift to visual signals in a riverine songbird, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.049

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 9:58am

There are several possible explanations for the vascular effects of COVID. The COVID-19 virus acts on specific receptors in the body, called the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors, that are present on the lining of the blood vessels. The virus uses these receptors to enter and infect cells.

This may result in vascular dysfunction and accelerated vascular aging. Our body's inflammation and immune responses, which defend against infections, may also be involved.

One of the reasons for the difference between women and men could be differences in the function of the immune system. Women mount a more rapid and robust immune response, which can protect them from infection. However, this same response can also increase damage to blood vessels after the initial infection.

Vascular aging is easy to measure and can be addressed with widely available treatments, such as lifestyle changes, blood pressure-lowering and cholesterol-lowering drugs. For people with accelerated vascular aging, it is important to do whatever possible to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The researchers are working now on this aspect.

 Rosa Maria Bruno et al, Accelerated vascular ageing after COVID-19 infection: the CARTESIAN study, European Heart Journal (2025). DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehaf430

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 19, 2025 at 9:57am

COVID infection ages blood vessels, especially in women, research reveals

A COVID infection, particularly in women, may lead to blood vessels aging around five years, according to research published in the European Heart Journal.

Blood vessels gradually become stiffer with age, but the new study suggests that COVID could accelerate this process. Researchers say this is important since people with stiffer blood vessels face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, including stroke and heart attack.

Researchers know that COVID can directly affect blood vessels. They think that this may result in what they call early vascular aging, meaning that your blood vessels are older than your chronological age and you are more susceptible to heart disease. If that is happening, we need to identify who is at risk at an early stage to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

The study included 2,390 people from 16 different countries (Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Turkey, UK and US) who were recruited between September 2020 to February 2022.

They were categorized according to whether they had never had COVID, had recent COVID but were not hospitalized, hospitalized for COVID on a general ward or hospitalized for COVID in an intensive care unit.

Researchers assessed each person's vascular age with a device that measures how quickly a wave of blood pressure travels between the carotid artery (in the neck) and femoral arteries (in the legs), a measure called carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV). The higher this measurement, the stiffer the blood vessels and the higher the vascular age of a person. Measurements were taken six months after COVID infection and again after 12 months.

Researchers also recorded demographic information such as patient's sex, age and other factors that can influence cardiovascular health.

After taking these factors into consideration, researchers found that all three groups of patients who had been infected with COVID, including those with mild COVID, had stiffer arteries, compared to those who had not been infected. The effect was greater in women than in men and in people who experienced the persistent symptoms of long COVID, such as shortness of breath and fatigue.

The average increase in PWV in women who had mild COVID was 0.55 meters per second, 0.60 in women hospitalized with COVID, and 1.09 for women treated in intensive care. Researchers say an increase of around 0.5 meters per second is "clinically relevant" and equivalent to aging around five years, with a 3% increased risk of cardiovascular disease in a 60-year-old woman.

People who had been vaccinated against COVID generally had arteries that were less stiff than people who were unvaccinated. Over the longer term, the vascular aging associated with COVID infection seemed to stabilize or improve slightly.

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