News & Comment

Twenty-five years after its identification, the transcription factor NF-κB continues to attract intense effort from a large and diverse research community. Ranjan Sen offers a personal account of the discovery of NF-κB.

Few proteins have had as profound an influence on immunity and biology as the transcription factor NF-κB.

NF-κB-mediated inflammatory biology can be formulated as the following five states: latency, induction, response, resolution and pathology. The first four involve carefully tuned molecular processes; pathology is the loss of control.

Memory is the signature property of the adaptive response, and vaccination is a hugely important medical intervention—understanding the former will help perfect the latter.

Naive lymphocytes have a finite lifespan and are continually replaced by input from generative organs. In contrast, memory cells or their progeny can last a lifetime. The expanded populations of memory cells and their more widespread distribution provide protection against recurrent infection.

Budget battles in the US Congress are precipitating higher costs at government facilities, including federal funding of biomedical research.

Despite enormous progress in basic research, there are many gaps in understanding human immunity. Here we describe how new investigational tools and computational methods promise to improve the diagnosis, prognosis and therapy of the many diseases with components from the immune system.

Chronic inflammatory diseases represent a major challenge for both clinical research and patient care, and evidence indicates that these disorders develop as a result of complex gene-environment interactions. Better understanding of their cause-and-effect relationship is the basis for emerging proposals for therapy and prevention.

Nature Immunology launches its first podcast with a historical piece on immunology at the UK's National Institute of Medical Research as plans develop for the future of the institute.