One of the biggest challenges of transplants is the need to suppress the immune response - so the new organ is not rejected - while keeping it strong enough to be able to fight all kinds of disease. As the high numbers of rejected organs show, this is a tricky balance. But a discovery by Maria Monteiro and Luis Graça, two Portuguese scientists, could help solving the problem, at least in the liver. They have found a new type of white blood cell – baptised NKTreg (reg from regulatory) – that, remarkably, once activated, migrate into this organ where it suppress any immune response in its vicinity (but not elsewhere).

The basal ganglia is a series of highly connected brain areas localised deep in the cerebral cortex that recently has attracted interest of neuroscientists when it was linked to learning, and discovered to be affected in a number of disorders of the addictive and obsessive spectrum, but also in Parkinson’s disease (PD). And now researchers think they have understood why as they found that neurons in this area signal the beginning and the end of voluntary actions.

Portuguese scientists have just published a revolutionary new approach to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA) which, if translated to humans, can change the way we treat autoimmunity (and so diseases like RA but also diabetes and MS) and, with it, the lives of millions of patients

The new treatment by Joana Duarte, Luis Graca and colleagues from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular (IMM) in Lisbon is remarkable because it specifically stops the abnormal immunological response behind RA without touching the rest of the immune system, and a short treatment has long lasting effects suggesting that it might even cure the disease.

For some years now a small group of scientists have been pioneering a revolutionary idea; that the vertebrate immune system could have a role in the regulation of iron in the body.

Now a study in the journal Immunology shows that human lymphocytes (white blood cells) actually produce hepcidin, the most important protein in the regulation of iron levels in the body. What was unexpected was the fact that hepcidin affected lymphocyte multiplication, which occurs for example during an infection, showing that the two systems seem to be much more interlinked than even previously imagined.

Doctors can now understand better chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), including how it responds to therapy, thanks to a new mathematical model for the disease developed by scientists in Portugal, Belgium and the United States. The work, to be published in the June edition of the journal Haematologica, also reveals that current therapies – which are not believed to cure CML – with the right protocol can actually get rid of the disease, and provides guidelines on how to do that. CML although rare, because of effective life-extending therapies, is now one of the most common leukaemias in the world