Immunotherapy has unleashed a revolution in care for some cancer patients. But most immunotherapies help only a small subset of patients, meaning doctors often have to resort to a trial-and-error process to determine who might actually benefit from the novel treatments. Now, scientists have developed a new metric they believe can help predict whether patients will respond
The immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab may be a safe and effective treatment for people with advanced gastric or esophagogastric junction cancer who failed standard chemotherapy regimens, results from a Phase 3 clinical trial suggest. A three-year survival analysis of the trial, called ATTRACTION-2 (NCT02267343), showed that the treatment significantly extended patients’ lives and the time they
When the machinery that guides the transition of stem cells to somatic cells doesn’t shut down properly, cells can become cancerous. Identifying the mechanisms that impede those processes would offer scientists a target for cancer research. Purdue University scientists, led by Humaira Gowher, an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry, have discovered the epigenetic process that
In the first clinical study of its kind in the US, researchers used CRISPR to modify CAR T cells to make them more potent against cancer, but the clinical benefits are unknown. mmune cells altered by CRISPR are safe to use in cancer patients, according to results of a clinical trial reported February 6 in Science.
Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center systematically investigated the DNA of more than 2,600 tumour samples from patients with 38 different types of cancer to discover traces of viruses – which they found in 13 percent of the samples studied. The researchers also identified mechanisms that the pathogens use to trigger carcinogenic mutations in
A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) research team has found that the overgrowth of connective called fibrosis may block the effectiveness of immunotherapies against metastatic breast cancer. Their report published in PNAS also finds that plerixafor, a drug approved to mobilize blood system stem cells in the treatment of lymphoma and multiple myeloma patients, can reduce fibrosis in
CAR T-cell therapy is a highly promising treatment strategy for tumors, but is associated with life-threatening side effects. Researchers at EPFL, UNIL and CHUV have developed a new way to “switch off” the therapy when a cancer patient’s life is in danger, paving the way for safer immunotherapy approaches to target solid tumors. Immunotherapy, unlike
Mesoblast Limited today announced that it has submitted its completed Biologics License Application (BLA) to the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) for Ryoncil™ (remestemcel-L), its lead allogeneic cell therapy for the treatment of children with steroid-refractory acute graft versus host disease (SRaGVHD). Mesoblast filed the final module of the rolling BLA submission,
Using genetically engineered human pluripotent stem cells, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers created a new type of cancer model to study in vivo how glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer, develops and changes over time. “We have developed stem cell models that are CRISPR-engineered to have tumor-associated driver mutations
Stanford data scientists have shown that figuring out a single number can help them find the most dangerous cancer cells. Biomedical data scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that the number of genes a cell uses to make RNA is a reliable indicator of how developed the cell is, a finding that could
