But a team of investigators co-led by Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Andrés García overcame this hurdle in previous small animal studies. Their technique uses synthetic hydrogel particles called microgels. The microgels present a potent immunomodulatory protein called SA-FasL to modulate the body’s immune response, allowing the transplanted insulin-producing cells to safely do their job, regulating blood glucose levels, and fighting diabetes.

A new study in the journal Science Advances from García and his collaborators moves this hopeful treatment strategy closer to the clinic.

“Immunosuppression is a significant problem for patients, but in our prior work we showed that this biomaterial, this microgel, is a potent immunomodulatory molecule, and can induce permanent acceptance of the new cells,” said García, the Petit Chair in Bioengineering and Regents’ Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

“But that study was done in mice, and the immune system of a mouse if very different from a human’s,” García added. “And in the progression toward clinical use, you really need to test this strategy in a large animal model.”

Now, they have. García and his fellow researchers from the University of Missouri and Massachusetts General Hospital explain their results in the new paper.

Their study, funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, demonstrates how co-transplanting islet cells with SA-FasL-microgels reversed diabetic symptoms while overcoming the immune response in nonhuman primates. The researchers without using immunosuppressants, which can have dangerous side effects.

The microgels essentially teach the immune system to accept the graft, interrupting the body’s inclination to reject the transplant and circumventing the need for continuous immunosuppression.

“Those immunosuppressive regimens are toxic to the patient, so a major goal in the field has been to develop approaches that will allow you to put in this graft and get it to function without chronic immunosuppression,” said García.

Because the biomaterial can be created in a lab and shipped anywhere, the new therapeutic is essentially off-the-shelf. And now that they’ve proven the strategy works in nonhuman primates, García and his collaborators are confident that patients with type 1 diabetes could have a powerful new treatment option.

García is co-founder of the company that licensed the technology, iTolerance, which is already discussing plans for human clinical trials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“We are pretty pumped — this is very exciting, and these are hopeful results for people fighting type 1 diabetes,” said García, corresponding author and part of a 20-person research team. “This work wouldn’t have been possible with this team science approach.”

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“Sperm epigenetic clock associates with pregnancy outcomes in the general population,” (link to article here), published in the journal Human Reproduction, found that sperm epigenetic aging clocks may act as a novel biomarker to predict couples’ time to pregnancy. The findings also underscore the importance of the male partner in reproductive success.

“Chronological age is a significant determinant of reproductive capacity and success among couples attempting pregnancy, but chronological age does not encapsulate the cumulative genetic and external — environmental conditions — factors, and thus it serves as a proxy measure of the ‘true’ biological age of cells,” said J. Richard Pilsner, Ph.D., lead author of the study. Dr. Pilsner is the Robert J. Sokol, M.D., Endowed Chair of Molecular Obstetrics and Gynecology and director of Molecular Genetics and Infertility at WSU’s C.S. Mott Center for Human Growth and Development. “Semen quality outcomes utilizing World Health Organization guidelines have been used to assess male infertility for decades, but they remain poor predictors of reproductive outcomes. Thus, the ability to capture the biological age of sperm may provide a novel platform to better assess the male contribution to reproductive success, especially among infertile couples.”

Sperm epigenetic aging is the biological, rather than the chronological, aging of sperm. The study found a 17% lower cumulative probability of pregnancy after 12 months for couples with male partners in older compared to younger sperm epigenetic aging categories. The study involved 379 male partners of couples who discontinued the use of contraception for the purpose of becoming pregnant.

The study also found a higher epigenetic aging of sperm in men who smoked.

The results, Dr. Pilsner said, indicate that higher sperm epigenetic aging is associated with a longer time to become pregnant in couples not assisted by fertility treatment, and among couples that achieved pregnancy, with shorter gestation.

The strong association between sperm epigenetic aging and pregnancy probability and its slowing or reversal through lifestyle choices and/or pharmacological interventions warrants further investigation. In addition, because older fathers have an increased risk of children with adverse neurological outcomes, it is important to understand the potential relation of sperm epigenetic aging on children’s health and development.

“There is a critical need for new measures of male fecundity for assessing overall reproductive success among couples in the general population,” Dr. Pilsner said. “These data show that our sperm epigenetic clocks may fulfill this need as a novel biomarker that predicts pregnancy success among couples not seeking fertility treatment. While chronological age of both partners remains a significant predictor of reproductive success, our clocks likely recapitulate both external and internal factors that drive the biological aging of sperm. Such a summary measure of sperm biological age is of clinical importance, as it allows couples in the general population to realize their probability of achieving pregnancy during natural intercourse, thereby informing and expediting potential infertility treatment decisions.”

Dr. Pilsner advised that because those studied were largely Caucasian, greater and more diverse cohorts are necessary to confirm the association between sperm epigenetic aging and couple pregnancy success in other races and ethnicities.

The research was funded in part by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (R01ES028298 and P30 ES020957); and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (N01-HD-3-3355, N01-HD-3-3356 and N01-HD-3-3358).

When thinking about quantum mechanical systems, single photons and well-​isolated ions and atoms may spring to mind, or electrons spreading through a crystal. More exotic in the context of quantum mechanics are genuinely mechanical quantum systems; that is, massive objects in which mechanical motion such as vibration is quantized. In a series of seminal experiments, quintessential quantum-​mechanical features have been observed in mechanical systems, including energy quantization and entanglement. However, with a view to putting such systems to use in fundamental studies and technological applications, observing quantum properties is but a first step. The next one is to master the handling of mechanical quantum objects, so that their quantum states can be controlled, measured, and eventually exploited in device-​like structures. The group of Yiwen Chu in the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at ETH Zurich has now made major progress in that direction. Writing in Nature Physics, they report the extraction of information from a mechanical quantum system without destroying the precious quantum state. This advance paves the path to applications such as quantum error correction, and beyond.

Massive quantum mechanics

The ETH physicists employ as their mechanical system a slab of high-​quality sapphire, a little under half a millimetre thick. On its top sits a thin piezoelectrical transducer that can excite acoustic waves, which are reflected at the bottom and thus extend across a well-​defined volume inside the slab. These excitations are the collective motion of a large number of atoms, yet they are quantized (in energy units known as phonons) and can be subjected, in principle at least, to quantum operations in very much the same ways as the quantum states of atoms, photons and electrons can be. Intriguingly, it is possible to interface the mechanical resonator with other quantum systems, and with superconducting qubits in particular. The latter are tiny electronic circuits in which electromagnetic energy states are quantized, and they are currently one of the leading platforms for building scalable quantum computers. The electromagnetic fields associated with the superconducting circuit enable the coupling of the qubit to the piezoelectrical transducer of the acoustic resonator, and thereby to its mechanical quantum states.

In such hybrid qubit-resonator devices, the best of two worlds can be combined. Specifically, the highly developed computational capabilities of superconducting qubits can be used in synchrony with the robustness and long lifetime of acoustical modes, which can serve as quantum memories or transducers. For such applications, however, merely coupling qubit and resonator states will be not enough. For example, a straightforward measurement of the quantum state in the resonator destroys it, making repeated measurements impossible. What is needed instead is the capability to extract information about the mechanical quantum state in a more gentle, well-​controlled manner.

The non-​destructive path

Demonstrating a protocol for such so-​called quantum non-​demolition measurements is what Chu’s doctoral students Uwe von Lüpke, Yu Yang and Marius Bild, working with Branco Weiss fellow Matteo Fadel and with support from semester project student Laurent Michaud, now achieved. In their experiments there is no direct energy exchange between the superconducting qubit and the acoustic resonator during the measurement. Instead, the properties of the qubit are made to depend on the number of phonons in the acoustic resonator, with no need to directly ‘touch’ the mechanical quantum state — think about a theremin, the musical instrument in which the pitch depends on the position of the musician’s hand without making physical contact with the instrument.

Creating a hybrid system in which the state of the resonator is reflected in the spectrum of the qubit is highly challenging. There are stringent demands on how long the quantum states can be sustained both in the qubit and in the resonator, before they fade away due to imperfections and perturbations from the outside. So the task for the team was to push the lifetimes of both the qubit and the resonator quantum states. And they succeeded, by making a series of improvements, including a careful choice of the type of superconducting qubit used and encapsulating the hybrid device in a superconducting aluminium cavity to ensure tight electromagnetic shielding.

Quantum information on a need-​to-know basis

Having successfully pushed their system into the desired operational regime (known as the ‘strong dispersive regime’), the team were able to gently extract the phonon-​number distribution in their acoustic resonator after exciting it with different amplitudes. Moreover, they demonstrated a way to determine in one single measurement whether the number of phonons in the resonator is even or odd — a so-​called parity measurement — without learning anything else about the distribution of phonons. Obtaining such very specific information, but no other, is crucial in a number of quantum-​technological applications. For instance, a change in parity (a transition from an odd to an even number or vice versa) can signal that an error has affected the quantum state and that correcting is needed. Here it is essential, of course, that the to-​be-corrected state is not destroyed.

Before an implementation of such error-​correction schemes is possible, however, further refinement of the hybrid system is necessary, in particular to improve the fidelity of the operations. But quantum error correction is by far not the only use on the horizon. There is an abundance of exciting theoretical proposals in the scientific literature for quantum-​information protocols as well as for fundamental studies that benefit from the fact that the acoustic quantum states reside in massive objects. These provide, for example, unique opportunities for exploring the scope of quantum mechanics in the limit of large systems and for harnessing the mechanical quantum systems as a sensor.

The collective movement of biological organisms is a common phenomenon in the natural world. Insects and fish, for instance, tend to move in swarms. Often, collective movement also occurs at the cellular level, such as when cancer cells migrate from a tumour or bacteria form a biofilm. The collaboration of many individuals can give rise to so-called emergent behaviour — new characteristics that would not otherwise exist in this form. “In physics, collectivity creates such important processes as phase transitions, superconductivity, and magnetic properties,” explains Prof. Dr Ulrich Schwarz, head of the “Physics of Complex Biosystems” working group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Heidelberg University. In an interdisciplinary study together with Prof. Dr Friedrich Frischknecht (malaria research) and Prof. Dr Karl Rohr (biomedical image analysis), he has shown that collective movement can also occur in Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria.

The single-celled organism is injected into the skin through a mosquito bite, developing first in the liver and then later in the blood. Because Plasmodium acts as a single cell in most of its stages, until now its collective properties were hardly studied. In the salivary gland of the mosquito, the parasite has a long and curved shape, similar to a crescent moon, and is known as a sporozoite. “As soon as sporozoites are injected into the skin by the mosquito, individual parasites begin to quickly move toward the blood vessels. This is the critical phase of the infection, because it is successful only if a pathogen reaches the blood stream,” stresses Prof. Frischknecht.

In their studies at the Center for Infectious Diseases of Heidelberg University Hospital, Friedrich Frischknecht and his team discovered that the parasites in infected salivary glands can be mobilised as a collective. To do so, the salivary glands are dissected from the mosquito and carefully pressed between two small glass plates. The researchers were surprised to discover that the crescent moon-shaped cells form rotating vortices in the new preparation. They are reminiscent of the collective movements of bacteria or fish, although they differ in that they always rotate in the same direction. The parasite vortices therefore have a chiral character and — likewise unexpectedly — fluctuate in size. According to Prof. Frischknecht, these oscillations point to emergent characteristics, since they are possible only in the collective of the moving cells and grow stronger in larger vortices.

To understand these phenomena more precisely, the experimental data were analysed quantitatively. The groups of Ulrich Schwarz and Karl Rohr, head of the Biomedical Computer Vision Group at BioQuant Centre of Heidelberg University, used cutting-edge methods of image processing for this purpose. They were able to track individual parasites in the rotating vortices and measure both their speed and curvature. Using so-called agent-based computer simulations, it was possible to precisely identify those laws that can explain all aspects of the experimental observations. The interplay of active movement, curved shape of the cell, and chirality in conjunction with mechanical flexibility is sufficient to explain the sorting and oscillation phenomena in the parasite vortices. The oscillations the scientists observed arise because the movement of the individual pathogens is converted into elastic energy that is stored in the vortex. “Our new model system offers the opportunity to better understand the physics of collectives with elastic properties and perhaps render them usable for technical applications in the future,” states the physicist Ulrich Schwarz.

In the next step, the researchers will investigate exactly how the chirality of movement comes about. The structure of sporozoites suggests different possibilities that can be studied in experiments with genetic mutations. Initial computer simulations have already shown that the right- and left-turning parasites quickly segregate and generate separate vortex systems. A better understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms could open up new avenues to disrupt sporozoite movement at the onset of every malaria infection. “In any event, our study has shown that the mechanics of the pathogens play an extremely important and heretofore overlooked role — a finding that also opens up new perspectives for medical interventions,” explains the infectiologist Friedrich Frischknecht.

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Researchers with the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering’s Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center are investigating better ways to predict where road-clogging debris will be most severe after tropical cyclones. Their latest paper was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

“This research is especially relevant as hurricane season approaches because it reminds us that we need a variety of tools to properly respond to these storms,” said Eren Ozguven, RIDER Center director and the paper’s senior author. “This paper describes an important tool and applies it to disasters in the Florida Panhandle.”

Researchers used satellite images to measure the amount of vegetation in Bay County, Florida, before and after two tropical storms and three hurricanes, including Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that devastated the county in 2018. That gave them an estimate of how much vegetative debris those storms caused and where debris was heaviest. They were able to correlate debris measurements with factors such as wind speed, initial amount of vegetation and roadway density.

The researchers found debris was heavier in suburban and urban areas, which have a high density of people and roads, compared with rural areas. Although vegetation is not the only type of debris caused by a hurricane, it is an important predictor of where roads will be blocked.

Researchers aim to develop a tool that gives emergency management planners an estimate of the debris storms are likely to generate — allowing officials to plan, for example, where to position trucks and collection zones ahead of storms.

“The faster you can get debris off the roadway, the better you will be in terms of getting back to normal after a hurricane hits,” said paper co-author Tarek Abichou, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering.

Along with understanding where to position resources before a storm, officials can use satellite imagery after a hurricane to quickly and inexpensively get an idea of post-storm damage before deploying first responders.

The work is part of RIDER’s efforts to use remote-sensing technology to solve civil engineering problems.

“Engineering is all about finding solutions despite obstacles, and hurricanes throw up all sorts of obstacles,” Abichou said. “Improving our ability to use remote sensing to prepare for and recover from storms will help us overcome those challenges.”

Former FAMU-FSU College of Engineering doctoral student Alican Karaer served as the paper’s lead author. Co-authors were Mingyang Chen of Harbin Institute of Technology; former FAMU-FSU College of Engineering doctoral student Mahyar Ghorbanzadeh; and Michele Gazzea and Reza Arghandeh of the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

This paper was supported by the National Science Foundation Coastlines and People (CoPe) Award 1940319.

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Materials provided by Florida State University. Original written by Bill Wellock. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

At the time of their collection, these specimens were key to proving that some mammals lay eggs — a fact that changed the course of scientific thinking and supported the theory of evolution.

This unique collection had not been catalogued by the Museum, so until recently staff had been unaware of its existence. The exciting find was made when Jack Ashby, Assistant Director at the Museum, was doing research for a new book on Australian mammals.

“It’s one thing to read the 19^th century announcements that platypuses and echidnas actually lay eggs. But to have the physical specimens here, tying us back to that discovery almost 150 years ago, is pretty amazing,” said Ashby.

He added: “I knew from experience that there isn’t a natural history collection on Earth that actually has a comprehensive catalogue of everything in it, and I suspected that Caldwell’s specimens really ought to be here.” He was right: three months after Ashby asked Collections Manager Mathew Lowe to keep an eye out, a small box of specimens was found in the Museum with a note suggesting they were Caldwell’s. Ashby’s investigations confirmed this was indeed the case.

Until Europeans first encountered platypuses and echidnas in the 1790s, it had been assumed that all mammals give birth to live young. The question of whether some mammals lay eggs then became one of the biggest questions of 19^th century zoology, and hotly debated in scientific circles. The newly discovered collection of little jars represents the huge scientific endeavour that went into solving this mystery.

“In the nineteenth century, many conservative scientists didn’t want to believe that an egg-laying mammal could exist, because this would support the theory of evolution — the idea that one animal group was capable of changing into another,” said Ashby.

He added: “Lizards and frogs lay eggs, so the idea of a mammal laying eggs was dismissed by many people — I think they felt it was degrading to be related to animals that they considered ‘lower life forms.'”

The newly discovered collection includes echidnas, platypuses and marsupials at varying life stages from fertilised egg to adolescence. Caldwell was the first to make complete collections of every life stage of these species — although not all of the specimens have been found in the Museum.

For 85 years, European naturalists had been attempting to find proof that platypuses and echidnas lay eggs — including by asking Aboriginal Australians — but any results they sent home were ignored or dismissed.

William Caldwell was sent to Australia in 1883 — with substantial financial backing from the University of Cambridge, the Royal Society and the British Government — to resolve the long-standing mystery.

In an extensive search Caldwell collected around 1,400 specimens with the help of a large group of Aboriginal Australians. In 1884 the team eventually found an echidna with an egg in her pouch, and a platypus with one egg in her nest and another just about to be laid.

This was the definitive proof Caldwell had been looking for, and the news was sent around the world. The colonial scientific establishment was apparently only willing to accept this result now that it had been confirmed by ‘one of their own’.

Ashby says that over the last two centuries, scientists have consistently belittled Australian mammals by describing them as strange and inferior. He believes that this language continues to affect how we describe them today, and undermines efforts to conserve them.

“Platypuses and echidnas are not weird, primitive animals — as many historic accounts depict them — they are as evolved as anything else. It’s just that they’ve never stopped laying eggs,” he said, adding, “I think they’re absolutely amazing and definitely worth valuing.”

The quill-covered echidnas are the most widespread mammal in Australia. They cover the whole continent and have adapted to live in all climates — from snow-covered mountains through to the driest deserts.

Platypuses are one of the only mammals that can detect electricity, and one of the only mammals to produce venom. With a tail like a beaver, a flat bill, and webbed feet like a duck, when the first specimens were brought to Europe people thought they were fakes that had been sewn together.

Both platypuses and echidnas have a unique combination of traits that 19th century scientists thought should only exist individually in either mammals, reptiles or birds. This made them central to debates around evolution.

Ashby’s new book, Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals, is published in the UK on 12 May, 2022 by Harper Collins.

Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center say this newfound vulnerability involves a misuse of a type of T cell, part of a large family of blood cells that are essential to a functioning immune system.

A team led by Hutch immunologist Dr. Martin Prlic, staff scientist Dr. Florian Mair and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Jami Erickson published the findings in Nature. They identified a subset of T cells that show up in great numbers in head and neck tumors, but not in similar tissues of the mouth inflamed by common ailments such as gum disease.

It seems that this odd group of T cells have mixed up their highly specialized assignments within our immune systems and are now working to protect tumor cells.

The evidence Prlic, Mair, and Erickson uncovered might help explain why cutting-edge immunotherapies that work against blood cancers are less effective against solid tumors (such as breast, prostate, kidney and colorectal cancers), which are responsible for most cancer deaths. Researchers say it points the way for future drugs that might strip away that protection, making current therapies work better for more people.

“Ironically, this is not what we tried to do,” Prlic said. “We were just interested in general about what makes the tumor environment different from ordinary inflammation. It was as if you were not looking for treasure, but then you stumble upon something many others have been looking for.”

New methods reveal unnoticed T cell trait

The discovery came after the Hutch team developed new methods to analyze cells in inflamed tissues and applied complex computer analyses to their studies. They compared the kinds of immune cells found in and around patients’ head and neck tumors with those that appeared in tissue samples from patients treated for gum diseases.

As they suspected, the immune cells responding to the tumor were very similar to those in the inflamed gum tissues — until they took a closer look at their data and uncovered a surprising difference in one type of T cell drawn to the cancer samples.

T cells carry out a variety of tasks in the immune system. One of the most important is to stir up an inflammatory response, a coordinated assault to destroy cells damaged by infectious agents or cancer. Mobs of T cells do much of this killing themselves.

Other types of T cells work to calm their over-active brethren. Known as regulatory T cells, or T-regs, they typically tamp down inflammation, quieting that mob and thereby protecting nearby healthy tissues. Without enough T-regs, people can be vulnerable to unchecked abuses of their own immune system, suffering autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

What Prlic and his colleagues found was a different flavor of T-regs. These immune-suppressing cells, swarming in the tumor-environment specimens, were different from T-regs found elsewhere in the body. Their cell surfaces are marked by two distinct protein receptors. These specially marked T-regs were particularly good at tamping down inflammation, expanding in number and protecting the tumor cells from attack by other types of T cells.

“A very large fraction of these critical, immunosuppressive cells in the tumor have this trait,” said Mair, who began work on the study with Erickson five years ago. “You don’t see it in T-regs that circulate in the blood, while in the tumor we see that up to 75% of the T-regs make these receptors.”

To a casual observer, the T-regs from the tumor samples would look no different from those found elsewhere in the body. But the team used new techniques that allow scientists to identify characteristics of tens of thousands of individual cells in a sample, and advanced computing methods to sift through data. It allowed them to spot two types of receptor proteins on the surfaces of T-regs collected from the tumor. The telltale proteins have names only a scientist could love: IL-1R1 and ICOS.

“What makes these cells unique is that they express [display] both those proteins,” Prlic said. “You just don’t see that co-expression on other T-reg cells.”

As soon as this duo of molecular-scale markers was discovered, the researchers knew that T-regs bearing them would be easy to spot with a simple test — an antibody that binds to the markers and carries a fluorescent tag.

Once revealed, a cancer trick could be undone

One reason this pair of proteins may have been overlooked by researchers previously is that they occur in human T-regs, not in those of mice. Much of laboratory work in immunology relies on mouse “models” of the immune response, but this study focused on human tissues, taken from patients who either had cancer or non-cancerous lesions.

“This doesn’t take anything away from the importance of mouse models. It just highlights that we also need to study human tumor tissues, so we don’t miss out on things like this,” Prlic said.

These human tumor-related T-regs were clustered in the thicket of blood cells and connective tissues in and around the malignant mass — a site of biological territory known as the tumor microenvironment. And because these cells are easy to spot, in theory they also can be easily targeted by anticancer drugs.

“All of a sudden, we now have a way of specifically targeting T-regs that only appear in tumors, and that is something that wasn’t possible before,” Prlic said.

Prlic and his team hypothesize that these tumor-resident T-regs have been tricked by cancer into working for the wrong team. Surrounded by T cells searching for cancer cells to destroy, the tumors acquired an ability to either attract or generate a blanket of these ICOS/IL-1R1-bearing T-regs. Exactly how they did so is not clear, but their impact is to build up an “immunosuppressive” environment, protecting the tumor from ordinary T cells doing their jobs.

While the research focused on head and neck tumors, Mair, Erickson and Prlic believe that their discovery may be important for many more types of cancer. Once they learned that presence of these markers was important, the Hutch researchers scanned a database of genes activated in specimens representing 21 different cancer types. Looking only for the gene encoding the rarer IL-1R1 protein, they saw it pop up, at varying levels, among all 19 solid-tumor cancer types, but not in the remaining two, which were blood cancers.

If a drug can be designed to knock out only T-regs in tumors, but not harm these immune-suppressing cells elsewhere, it might be an effective way to disable solid-tumor defenses. If the rogue immune cells can be rooted out, cancer-fighting T cells would be able to attack the tumor, while ordinary T-regs could do their job — keeping inflammation from damaging healthy tissues.

Prlic and his colleagues are hoping to develop a “bispecific” antibody — one that can grab two different molecular targets at the same time. In this case, one arm of the Y-shaped antibody protein would bind to the ICOS receptor; the other arm would lock on the IL-1R1 receptor.

The purpose of the bispecific antibody would be to disable or mark for destruction all the tumor-resident T-regs, while not harming these inflammation-calming cells elsewhere in the body. Previous efforts by drug developers to target T-regs failed because they lacked the precision to destroy only the T-regs protecting the tumor.

Now, scientists may have a path to only targeting T-regs that have been tricked into protecting tumors, perhaps freeing the rest of the immune system to do its job.