Cancer research

RareCan, a new company accelerating research into rare cancers, has appointed Dr Anita Cooper as Non-Executive Director. The appointment is said to strengthen the scientific and pharmaceutical experience of RareCan’s board in support of the company’s planned commercial growth. With over 30 years’ global business experience, Cooper has worked across diverse functions, skill levels and […]

A Mount Sinai study titled Simultaneous CK2/TNIK/DYRK1 inhibition by 108600 suppresses triple negative breast cancer stem cells and chemotherapy-resistant disease describes how a novel therapeutic (108600) combats aggressive chemotherapy-resistant triple-negative breast cancer (TBNC). 108600 targets and inhibits breast cancer stem cells, a subpopulation of cells found within patient triple negative breast cancers that can promote […]

In the UK, researchers Professor Andrew Beggs and Professor Gary Middleton from the Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy and the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences have partnered with Cancer Research UK in a target identification project for the Immuno-oncology Alliance, which translates discovery science into new therapeutics for cancer patients. The Immuno-oncology Alliance, formed […]

Oncimmune Holdings has signed an autoantibody profiling contract with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Dana-Farber, a clinical affiliate and research institute of Harvard Medical School, is a cancer research organisation and its cancer hospitals have more than 1,100 therapeutic and non-therapeutic clinical trials in progress. Under this agreement, Oncimmune will utilise its biomarker discovery […]

Mount Sinai researchers have developed a therapeutic agent that shows high effectiveness in vitro at disrupting a biological pathway that helps cancer survive, according to a paper published in Cancer Discovery. The therapy is an engineered molecule called MS21 that causes the degradation of AKT, an enzyme that is overly active in many cancers. This […]

Mount Sinai researchers have found that widely available and inexpensive drug targeting inflammatory genes have reduced morbidity and mortality in mice infected with SARS-CoV-2. Following its publication in Cell, and reporting by DDW, Megan Thomas spoke to Dr Ivan Marazzi, co-author of the study and associate professor in the Microbiology Department at the Icahn School […]

Gadeta, a clinical-stage company developing gamma delta (γδ) T-cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapies for cancer patients, has announced the dosing of the first patient with GDT-002 (formerly labelled TEG002), a potential first-in-class cellular immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer. The multicentre Phase I/II study in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Mass General Brigham Cancer Care […]

Sean Chang, Product Manager, Cell and Gene Therapy at Thermo Fisher Scientific It has been four years since the first Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy drug, Kymriah1, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). Since then, four more CAR T-cell therapies […]

Mari Scheiffele is the General Manager for Oncology in the UK & Ireland at Novartis, responsible for launching innovative oncology therapies that can help to change the lives of people living with different types of cancer. She speaks to Lu Rahman about her passion for working with her teams to deliver innovative medicines to patients […]

National Institutes of Health scientists and their collaborators have identified an internal communication network in mammals that may regulate tissue repair and inflammation, providing new insights on how diseases such as obesity and inflammatory skin disorders develop. The new research is published in Cell. The billions of organisms living on body surfaces such as the […]

In the last decade, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as one the most promising treatments for the disease. In a recent pilot study, Professor Joachim Drevs and his co-authors; Joachim Ahlers, Eglys Gonzalez Marcano and Leona Kröhle describe how a new autologous vaccine developed in partnership with cancer clinic RGCC created a confirmed anti-tumour response in […]

Aleta Biotherapeutics and Cancer Research UK have collaborated to advance the early phase clinical development of Aleta’s CAR-T cell engager candidate, ALETA-001. Under the terms of the clinical development partnership, Cancer Research UK’s Centre for Drug Development will fund, sponsor and conduct the first-in-human Phase I/IIa clinical trial of ALETA-001, which will be led by […]

AstraZeneca and MSD’s Koselugo (selumetinib) has been granted conditional approval in the European Union for the treatment of symptomatic, inoperable plexiform neurofibromas (PN) in paediatric patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) aged three years and above. NF1 is a debilitating genetic condition affecting one in 3,000 individuals worldwide. In 30-50% of people with NF1, tumours […]

Scientists have identified a new class of targeted cancer drugs that offer the potential to treat patients whose tumours have faulty copies of the BRCA cancer genes. The drugs, known as POLQ inhibitors, specifically kill cancer cells with mutations in the BRCA genes while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Crucially, they can kill cancer cells that […]

Genmab and Bolt Biotherapeutics have entered into an oncology research and development collaboration. Together, the companies will evaluate Genmab antibodies and bispecific antibody engineering technologies in combination with Bolt’s proprietary Boltbody immune-stimulating antibody conjugate (ISAC) technology platform, with the goal of discovering and developing next-generation, immune-stimulatory, antibody-based conjugate therapeutics for the treatment of cancer. This […]

Women may have a stronger immune response to a common form of skin cancer than men, according to early research on mice and human cells. Led by University of Manchester scientists at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, the team publish their findings in Clinical Cancer Research. Men have more skin squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) […]