Over 40 years, Ralph Isberg at Tufts School of Medicine has trained dozens of scientists who are illuminating what makes bacterial pathogens tick.

BOSTON, MA [Sept. 23, 2026] — Our understanding of how cells interact with each other has been driven for decades by the central concept of receptor-mediated

Fascinated by evolution and driven by curiosity, Malik studies everything from viruses to Drosophila and, like his research subjects, is constantly reinventing himself.

TRAM is a regulator of myddosome assembly through dissociating MyD88 from the TLR–TIRAP complex to enable myddosome maturation and durable downstream signal transduction.

How cumulative environmental allergen exposures are encoded by peripheral sensory neurons to shape immune responsiveness is unclear. Zhu et al. show that protease allergens induce an mTORC1-dependent,...

Myddosomes, in which MyD88 forms barrel-like scaffold structures for effector protein recruitment and activation, contain proteins that act at all stages and regulate all effector responses ...

Nature Reviews Immunology, Published online: 24 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41577-026-01351-wThe discoveries that have transformed immunology often seem obvious in retrospect. Yet none began as an inevitable destination. They began with observations that did not fit, assumptions that somebody challenged, or questions that nobody yet realized were important. Discovery was the outcome. Surprise was the process.

Nature Reviews Immunology - Adaptive immunity is indispensable to vertebrates, yet most living organisms defend themselves perfectly well without it. Here, I ask why somatically diversified antigen...

Lipids generated by oxidative stress and their effects on immunity and cancer are reviewed.

The Review describes shared ancient, conserved mechanisms between human antiviral immunity and bacterial anti-phage systems, outlining universal principles of pathogen sensing, signalling and effector...

Pereira da Costa et al. define CXCR4 as a marker of dendritic cell activation in the steady state and in cancer, which is absent in activation elicited by Toll-like receptors or type I interferon rece...

Inflammasome activation in dendritic cells (DCs) leads to pyroptosis or hyperactivation. Zhivaki et al. show that in contrast to pyroptotic DCs, hyperactive DCs stimulate durable anti-tumor immunity t...

Adjuvants known as hyperactivators can correct age-associated defects in dendritic cells, enabling anti-tumor T cell responses in old and young mice. The protective immunity elicited by hyperactive de...

Dendritic cells (DCs) can acquire distinct functional states. To examine how different DC states orchestrate anti-tumor immunity, Koufaki et al. develop mouse models to label and ablate CCR7+ DCs and ...

How does the body recognize viral infection? How do viruses engage the immune system during replication? These seemingly simple questions led me to study pattern recognition, a concept first proposed ...

A new PAMP, a new innate immunity principle and a new preclinical application. I am so pleased to share our study on STING activation mechanisms in health and disease. Led by the fantastic Stephanie R...

Innate immune recognition of bacteria is thought to center on cell-surface or endosomal pattern recognition receptors such as TLRs. Ragland et al. identify an intraphagosomal cyclic dinucleotide (CDN)...