Cellular immunotherapy is the Lamine Yamal of cancer therapy. It is easy to forget how young the field is – and that as stunning as it is to watch in action already, it is still reaching its full potential. One aspect of doing so is working in a broader range of tumor types. The field made a giant step toward that goal with last week’s approval of Tecelra (afamitresgene autoleucel, Adaptimmune Therapeutics plc), the first CAR T cell to be approved for treatment of a solid tumor.

To be successful, CAR T-cells need a balance between being effective and overkill. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Vittoria Biotherapeutics Inc. have eliminated the CD5 signaling pathway of their CAR Ts to prevent the immunosuppressive brake effect. In return, this improved their proliferation and antitumor activity in T cell lymphomas.

The 2024 meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS), which is being held in Munich this week, began with the announcement of another curative bone marrow transplant. The new case brings the total number of patients cured of HIV via a bone marrow transplant up to 7 since “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown became the first such person in 2007.

The industry is looking, with renewed hope, to the “promise” of messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics for a wide range of diseases beyond COVID-19, and not only in vaccine form but also for gene and cell therapies.

The word “niche” implies a specialized environment. But to Fiona Doetsch, the stem cell niche is anything but. For brain stem cells, “the whole organism is the niche,” Doetsch told the audience at the third plenary session of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) annual meeting in Hamburg this week. It’s a surprising idea at first, given the brain’s protection from many circulating substances via a series of barriers, including the blood-brain barrier and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier.

Patients with congenital hearing loss could benefit from a gene therapy currently in development. Although there are approaches that could reverse the process in children and young people before it becomes severe, so far, adults do not have any treatment that prevents the progressive deterioration of auditory sensory cells caused by this disease.

The industry is looking, with renewed hope, to the “promise” of messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics for a wide range of diseases beyond COVID-19, and not only in vaccine form but also for gene and cell therapies.

New single-step genome editing techniques that enable the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at specified genome positions have been demonstrated in bacteria.

New single-step genome editing techniques that enable the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at specified genome positions have been demonstrated in bacteria.

The adverse effects of PD-1 blockers on the CNS observed in cancer patients could occur through their effects on an enzyme that activates microglia. Pharmacological inhibition of the enzyme in mice reduced microglial activation and cognitive deficit without altering the antitumor capacity of the immunotherapy.