Hilary Brueck Blood samples taken from a patient receiving CAR-T immunotherapy. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson A half dozen patients in Germany have been functionally cured of lupus — for now, at least. Their doctors used a blood-engineering technique that’s usually reserved for fighting aggressive cancers (CAR-T). It’s unlikely that such a technique could become widespread for lupus-sufferers,...
A type of cancer treatment known as CAR T therapy has shown great promise for blood cancer treatments in the last decade, but too often, patients relapse within a short time. Now, a team of researchers has uncovered some critical clues about why – potentially leading to treatments to prevent these relapses. CAR T therapy involves isolating...
by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute LAG3 Crystal Structure. Credit: Moffitt Cancer Center Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized cancer care. The therapy works by preventing tumors from shutting down the immune response, which in turn allows T cells to kill cancer cells. Established checkpoint inhibitors target the proteins PD-1 and CTLA-4 and...
by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Learning the rules for programming self-associating membrane proteins (MPs). (a) Rosetta fold, dock, and design uses backbone fragments from natural MPs to construct symmetric, de novo architectures and an MP energy function (Weinstein et al., 2019) to optimize the amino acid sequence. (b) Round 1 designs...
by University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center Reduced tumor sizes by FDG-PET imaging reflected in the red signal next to yellow arrows, in 6 mice receiving ivosidenib (AG-120) compared to control mice without drug. Credit: University Hospitals A drug used to target IDH1 mutations in select cancers also appears to inhibit the wild-type form of the enzyme,...
by Institute for Basic Science Figure 1. Cancer cells tend to accumulate many mutations during their growth. These include single base substitutions, small insertion/deletions (InDel), and large chromosomal changes. Researchers made CRISPR-Cas9 reagents targeting tumor-specific InDel mutations that can induce numerous double-strand breaks in the DNA of cancer cells, effectively killing them. Because normal cells...
by Liz Fuller-Wright, Princeton University In mice and in human tissue, a new compound discovered by Yibin Kang, seen here in his lab in 2017, disables a key gene that’s implicated in breast, prostate, liver, lung, colon and other cancers. Credit: Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications Imagine you could cure cancer by targeting one tiny gene....
by Karolinska Institutet Graphical abstract. Credit: DOI: 10.1016/j.redox.2021.102184 The gold complex auranofin has traditionally been used for treating rheumatism but is also being evaluated as a treatment for certain forms of cancer. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden now show that other molecules that inhibit the same biological system have a more specific effect than auranofin...
by Cristy Lytal, University of Southern California Figure 1. Structure-based design of selective CBX8 compounds. (A) Reported CBX7 compounds and their in vitro potency in an AlphaScreen competition assay. (B) Comparison of the alanine binding pocket size of CBX7 (top) and CBX8 (bottom). (C) Comparison of the aromatic cage region of CBX7 (top) and CBX8 (bottom). (D)...
by University of Huddersfield Two different compounds were generated using zinc (left) and manganese (right). Whilst these two compounds “look” very similar, the zinc compound demonstrated excellent anti-cancer activity and selectivity towards a range of cancers in the laboratory, whereas the manganese compound was comparatively much more toxic, meaning there was more anti-cancer activity at a...
