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From Magic Bullets to Super T Cells: Immunotherapy encompasses multiple approaches, including harnessing or enhancing immune cells, hormones, and other weapons of the immune system to destroy tumor cells, as well as releasing the brakes on the immune response that tumors trigger. This new article takes the reader on a journey from the origins of using toxins to prime the body’s immune system to attack tumors through today’s advances that genetically alter immune cells to fight cancer.

Liquid Biopsy is a new technology developed to advance cancer treatment. By using this innovative approach, physicians can enhance their ability to track cancer progression and to create highly individualized treatment plans for specific types of cancer. This complements existing approaches that use surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy to save lives.

Transmission of the Zika virus throughout South and Central America has become a rising global public health threat. Spread mainly through infected mosquitoes, this virus poses substantial health risks because it can be passed from a pregnant women to her fetus, potentially causing severe birth defects. The newest issue of Breakthroughs in Bioscience examines the brain development process, placing special emphasis on how the Zika virus affects the growing fetal brain.

In 1984, Charles Hull patented a process he called “stereolithography.” Now called three-dimensional (3D) printing, this technology has been used to manufacture rocket engines, custom-fit athletic shoes, and other 3D printers. The medical field also has reaped the benefits of 3D printing. Imaging data from computed tomography (CT) scans, ultrasounds, or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce 3D images on a computer, and precise 3D-printed anatomical models can be used for teaching or to help in surgical planning.

Throughout history, medical experts have dreamed of healing untreatable wounds, replacing a disfiguring scar with healthy skin, growing replacement lungs in the laboratory, and replacing a leg lost to injury or disease. Today, regenerative medicine has the potential to heal damaged tissues and organs, offering hope for those who have lost organ function due to age, disease, or injuries.

Just a generation ago, one out of five children in the United States died before reaching adulthood.  Repeated epidemics swept through the world, killing as many as one-quarter of the population. Today, that frightening world no longer exists because of tremendous progress made in vaccine development and use. Vaccines save 2.5 million lives globally every year—the equivalent of preventing 7,000 deaths each day.