Category Archives: Immunology

Emory pushes forward in AIDS vaccine research

Posted on September 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded Emory with a $6 million grant to continue work towards an AIDS vaccine.  The team, led by Bali Pulendran, PhD and Rafi Ahmed, PhD, includes researchers from across the university, including the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory Vaccine Center, and the Rollins School of Public Health.

The funding will go towards exploring how programming innate immunity can lead to protective antibodies against HIV in a nonhuman primate model, by using nanoparticles that mimic properties of the virus to illicit a response.

For more information about this research and the grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, please visit: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/09/gates_grant_for_aids_vaccine_research/campus.html.

 

 

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Posted in AIDS, Immunology, Research

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Levering the immune system against depression

Posted on September 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4-7UZk21wk&feature=player_detailpage]

An Emory University research team led by Andrew H. Miller, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, recently released the results of a study proposing a novel treatment target for difficult cases of depression.  Inflammation is the body’s innate reaction to a wound, but has also been observed in patients with depression and chronic inflammation is associated with depression cases that do not respond to typical medications and treatments.  In the study, participants with chronic inflammation and depression received infliximab, a drug used to treat inflammatory and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, or a placebo in addition to a prescribed anti-depression regimen. Infliximab was found to improve the treatment outcomes for depressed individuals with high levels of inflammation, and is a promising tool leveraging the immune system in the treatment of psychiatric conditions.
For more information about the study, please visit: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/09/psych_miller_inflam_dep_archgenpsych/index.html.

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Posted in Immunology, Inflammation, Psychology/Psychiatry, Research

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