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The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research announces a $1 million grant to The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) to study the harmful side effects that sometimes occur in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy. The research will involve mice engineered with humanized immune systems to find specific gene variants that could explain why so many patients - as many as 10 percent - develop Type 1 diabetes while undergoing immunotherapy to treat cancer. The grant will also study and determine how to predict which patients may experience myocarditis, a rare but potentially deadly inflammation of the heart that immunotherapy can also trigger.
This new grant project, Identifying Genes Uniquely Contributing to ICI-induced Immune Related Adverse Events, led by Professor Dave Serreze, Ph.D., and Scientific Director and Professor Nadia Rosenthal, Ph.D., F.Med.Sci., builds upon a $2.5 million grant the Mark Foundation awarded to JAX in 2019 aimed at determining how genetics influence immunother
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IMAGE: The AstroPath platform allows for the assessment of the level of expression of a given marker on individual cells, while maintaining information on their spatial location. Shown here is. view more
Credit: Seyoun Park, Ph.D.
Pairing sky-mapping algorithms with advanced immunofluorescence imaging of cancer biopsies, researchers at The Mark Foundation Center for Advanced Genomics and Imaging at Johns Hopkins University and the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy developed a robust platform to guide immunotherapy by predicting which cancers will respond to specific therapies targeting the immune system.
A new platform, called AstroPath, melds astronomic image analysis and mapping with pathology specimens to analyze microscopic images of tumors.
Presage Biosciences raises $13M and inks new deal with Merck for cancer drug tests
March 4, 2021 at 3:30 pm
Presage CEO Richard Klinghoffer. (Presage Photo)
New funds, new partners: Seattle’s Presage Biosciences announced $13 million in funding as well new collaborations with biotech giant Merck and California-based Maverick Therapeutics. Presage is a biotech device company that has built a platform for testing new cancer drugs used to treat tumors.
Presage has existing partnerships with healthcare heavy hitters Takeda Pharmaceutical, Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). The company has raised a total of $35 million in equity, and this its first venture round.
Quicker, cheaper drug screening: Before a cancer drug is given to patients in phase I trials, it’s first tested in the lab. But many of the drugs that appear to hold promise in that setting don’t perform well when marshaled against actual tumors in people.
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The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research (MFCR) has awarded seven grants to promising early-career investigators for projects aimed at addressing unmet needs in cancer research. The Emerging Leader Award program empowers scientists to take on innovative, high-risk/high-reward projects that have significant potential to improve outcomes for cancer patients.
The 2021 MFCR Emerging Leaders are pursuing important studies in areas of basic, translational, and clinical cancer research, including probing the function of cancer stem cells in brain cancer, discerning the unique molecular features of lung cancer in older patients, and identifying therapeutic combinations that will increase the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors across multiple types of cancer.
MFCR awards new grants to support an emerging approach to cancer therapeutics
The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research (MFCR) has awarded five new grants in support of an important, emerging approach to cancer therapeutics. The projects are centered around the molecular strategy of induced proximity, which involves controlling the physical distance between proteins to regulate or perturb biological processes in the cancer cell.
One of the biggest challenges in developing new cancer therapies is that many proteins are not tractable to the traditional approach in drug discovery of directly inhibiting the function of a therapeutic target. The induced proximity model aims to overcome this hurdle by altering the target protein s function without requiring that small molecules be direct inhibitors.