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A new study has revealed that a common and usually harmless virus may positively influence how skin cancer patients respond to current treatments. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common virus that, while typically asymptomatic, is carried for life by around 50–60% of UK adults. In healthy individuals, CMV is kept in a dormant state by the immune system. However, this process profoundly reshapes how the immune system operates. The study explored how CMV affected the immune responses of 341 melanoma patients receiving immunotherapy, a form of cancer treatment that helps harness the immune system to recognize and fight cancer. This research...

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common latent virus with over half of Americans infected with it by the age of 40, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).1 CMV typically lays dormant in people who do not have compromised immune systems. For those who are beset with the active virus, they can have more serious symptoms affecting various parts of the body including the eyes, lungs, liver, esophagus, stomach, and intestines. And for babies born with CMV, they can have brain, liver, spleen, lung, and growth issues. Hearing loss is the most common problem in this patient group...

Enlarge Image SIV surrenders. A monkey test of a new AIDS vaccine defeated a powerful strain of the simian version of HIV. Credit: Fotosearch A new study gives a much-needed booster shot to the beleaguered AIDS vaccine field. The experiment, led by immunologist and pathologist Louis Picker of the Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton, showed that an unusual approach to vaccinating against SIV (a simian cousin of HIV) protected 12 of 24 monkeys from a “challenge” with a particularly virulent strain of that virus. Specifically, all monkeys became infected, but in half of the animals, their immune...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US researchers have uncovered the key to how a prolific virus is able to reinfect individuals despite a strong immune response, possibly opening the way for vaccines to deadly pathogens including HIV and malaria. In a study of monkeys, scientists at Oregon Health Sciences University found that the common cytomegalovirus (CMV), which has infected up to 80 percent of the adult population, can overcome the body's ability to clean out infected cells unlike most viruses. "In essence, CMV is able to cutoff an infected cell's call for elimination. This allows CMV to overcome this critical immune barrier...

A common virus may be a major cause of high blood pressure, researchers said on Thursday in a finding that may bring new approach to treating a condition that affects an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. Based on a series of studies in mice, they said cytomegalovirus or CMV -- a herpes virus that affects some 60 to 99 percent of adults globally -- appears to increase inflammation in blood vessels, causing high blood pressure. And when combined with a fatty diet, CMV may also cause hardening of the arteries, a major risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, and kidney...

Shots might prevent some birth defects caused by cytomegalovirus infections in moms-to-be An experimental vaccine is effective half the time in stopping cytomegalovirus infection in women in their child-bearing years, researchers report in the March 19 New England Journal of Medicine. No vaccine currently exists for cytomegalovirus, which can cause birth defects when it infects a pregnant woman. Because of this risk, vaccine researchers have targeted the virus for decades — without any clear benefit until now. “This is the first vaccine that really shows prevention from infection with cytomegalovirus,” says Walla Dempsey, a microbiologist and immunologist at the National...

A vaccine that targets a common virus may stave off glioma tumor regrowthEditor's Note: This story will be published in the next issue of Scientific American Mind.The deadliest and most common type of brain cancer has a strange bedfellow: cytomegalovirus, a kind of herpes present in about 80 percent of the U.S. population. Now scientists are exploiting this coincidence to treat the cancer with a vaccine that targets the virus and slows tumor regrowth.In 2002 scientists showed that cytomegalovirus, or CMV, was active in the brain tumors but not the surrounding healthy tissue of all 27 patients they tested who...

For decades, people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome have struggled to convince doctors, employers, friends and even family members that they were not imagining their debilitating symptoms. Skeptics called the illness “yuppie flu” and “shirker syndrome.” --snip-- Dr. Reeves responded that understanding of the disease and of some newer research technologies is still in its infancy, so methodological disagreements were to be expected. He defended the population-based approach as necessary for obtaining a broad picture and replicable results. “To me, this is the usual scientific dialogue,” he said. Dr. Jose G. Montoya, a Stanford infectious disease specialist pursuing the kind...