The 60th Annual American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting in San Diego featured a number of presentations that highlighted the promise of CAR-T therapy. Researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center reported promising early results from a Phase Ib/II clinical trial that used autologous CAR-T cells to recognize and fight Hodgkin
Spinal fusion surgery is often the answer to cases of severe intervertebral disc degeneration where the cushioning that sits between the spinal vertebrae becomes damaged, causing patients to experience back and neck pain. However, the surgery does not restore native structure or mechanical function. Degeneration of the intervertebral disc (IVD) is due to combination of
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is characterized by an expansion of abnormal undifferentiated myeloblast due to an acquired mutation in blood-forming cells from the bone marrow, resulting in impaired hematopoiesis. The typical treatment for AML is induction chemotherapy but refractory disease is common, and relapse can occur causing initial and subsequent treatments to fail. This is
The development of immunotherapy is one of the greatest advances in cancer treatment, but up to 40% of cancer patients on immune checkpoint inhibitors develop clinically significant immune-related adverse events (irAEs) and up to 80% of individuals receiving checkpoint inhibitors experience some form of irAE. Predicting which patients will react negatively in response to immunotherapy
This week, from Wednesday November 7 through Sunday November 11, Akron Biotech representatives will be attending the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 33rd Annual Meeting at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. SITC 2018 is the leading destination for scientific exchange, education and networking in the cancer immunotherapy field. As an innovative
Tissue engineering has made extensive advances in the creation of biomaterials and scaffolds to better study the effects of treatments and therapies in vitro, but the spatial control over mechanical heterogeneity is a characteristic that scientists have struggled to achieve. The emergent rise of 3D printing has led to greater interest in 3D bioprinting through
Synthetic mRNA is an attractive alternative to DNA for gene therapies due to the transient nature and improved safety profile of mRNA, but broadly applicable methods to control expression from delivered mRNA are lacking. Regulation of gene expression is a critical aspect of gene therapies as the imbalance of an expressed protein could lead to
Cancer can exploit immune regulatory checkpoints molecules by inhibiting anti-tumor immune responses from T cells. These immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) antibodies that activate anti-tumor immune responses can create durable responses in 10%–20% of cancer patients, but the remaining 80%–90% of the patients do not respond, driving the need to find novel combination therapies that increase
Cancer therapies utilizing antibodies to disrupt the PD-1/PD-L1 interaction have been among the most exciting developments in immunotherapy with Dr. James Allison and Dr. Tasuku Honjo receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine this past week for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation. This premise of this approach to cancer therapy
Glioblastomas are an aggressive form of primary tumors that arise in the central nervous system. Glioblastomas are resistant to current modalities of treatment (i.e. surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy) and have one of the worst 5-year survival rates. One challenge in treating glioblastomas is delivering anticancer agents to the brain, which is protected by the
