T cells used in immunotherapy treatments can get exhausted and shut down by fighting cancer cells and tumors. Using a CRISPR-based edit on these cells’ genomes, researchers at UCSF and Gladstone Institutes have rendered the therapeutic cells more resilient against tumors.
Giving Immunotherapy Cells Resilience to Pass Stress Test miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Engineered Immune Cells Eliminate Brain Cancer in Mice
Researchers developed a new CAR T-cell therapy that targets specific growth factor receptors in glioblastoma to eliminate brain tumors.
Brooke Dulka, PhD
May 25, 2021
In Australia’s oldest medical research institute, researchers work to cure an aggressive brain cancer known as glioblastoma. The last decade has transformed the field of cancer research; blood cancers that were once death sentences now have treatment options. But glioblastoma remains a deadly enigma.
“I realized there was hardly any research happening in brain cancer, and applying immunotherapy there was the bold and ambitious plan we set for ourselves,” said immunologist Misty Jenkins, an associate professor at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. In a new study published in
MRI of glioblastomas.
Immunotherapies that fight cancer have been a life-saving advancement for many patients, but the approach only works on a few types of malignancies, leaving few treatment options for most cancer patients with solid tumors. Now, in two related papers published April 28, 2021, in Science Translational Medicine, researchers at UCSF have demonstrated how to engineer smart immune cells that are effective against solid tumors, opening the door to treating a variety of cancers that have long been untouchable with immunotherapies.
By “programming” basic computational abilities into immune cells that are designed to attack cancer, the researchers have overcome a number of major hurdles that have kept these strategies out of the clinic up to now. The two new papers show that the resulting “smart” therapies are more precise, flexible and thorough than previous approaches, and the researchers say that their approach may be ready for clinical trials in the near fut
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SAN DIEGO, Jan. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ NEUVOGEN, an immunoncology company, is pleased to appoint Christian Ottensmeier MD, PhD, FRCP Head of our Scientific Advisory Board ( SAB ). NEUVOGEN s technology platform differs from other immune priming technologies developed for solid tumors by virtue of its unprecedented breadth accompanied by an impressive adjuvant strategy, said Dr. Christian Ottensmeier, Head of the NEUVOGEN Scientific Advisory Board. Even if only a fraction of the targets primed by their vaccine are translated into primed T cells, the vaccine breadth will still exceed what is possible with other modalities.
Ottensmeier continued, NEUVOGEN s preclinical data demonstrates (in vitro) that their proprietary adjuvant strategy is able to prime against self-proteins preferentially expressed by tumors, opening the possibility that the vaccine may overcome peripheral tolerance. Furthermore, NEUVOGEN s preclinical demonstr