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
The esophagus is a muscular tube at the beginning of the gastrointestinal tract that actively facilitates the passing of food from the oral cavity and pharynx to the stomach. Tracheal and esophageal disorders are prevalent in humans and difficult to accurately model in mice due to substantial differences in tissue architecture. Researchers from Cincinnati Children’s
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a previous decision by the US Patent and Trademark Office which awarded the intellectual property on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology to the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, striking down an appeal by University of California, Berkeley and the University
Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) therapies have proved remarkably effective against leukemia and lymphoma, but for these therapies to target other types of cancer, there are still hurdles to overcome. Brain cancer is particularly challenging for immunotherapies due to the blood-brain barrier. This semi-permeable barrier tightly regulates the homeostasis of the central nervous
The European Commission (EC) has approved the use of Novartis’s tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) and Gilead’s axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta), two chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) therapies. Already approved by the FDA at the end of 2017, these therapies have been hailed as a breakthrough in cancer treatment by using a patient’s own T cells to
As a scorching summer draws to a close and conference season begins, Akron will be participating at many upcoming events to further advocate for the use of higher quality ancillary materials in regenerative medicine processes. Our focus of providing affordable cGMP reagents throughout the development stages for these unique therapeutics serves to better ensure reproducibility
If all cells have a similar risk of mutation and equivalent cancer suppression mechanisms, then large organisms with many cells should have a higher risk of developing cancer than small organisms with fewer cells. However, there is no correlation between body size and cancer risk across species, a phenomenon often called “Peto’s paradox”. Elephants are
Hereditary pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (herPAP) is a rare life-threatening disease characterized by the slow accumulation of lipoproteins in the lungs. Surfactant and other lipoproteins are typically cleared from alveoli by a specialized group of cells called alveolar macrophages that require the signaling molecule termed granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating growth factor (GM-CSF) to maintain normal surfactant levels.
