A research team at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), funded by Cancervax Inc., has created a promising new bispecific antibody vaccine for treating recurrent Ewing sarcoma.
Conformation-X Therapeutics LLC has closed an oversubscribed funding tranche of $3.65 million to support the company’s development of a pipeline of immunotherapies that activate both the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system.
A new method of CAR T-cell immunotherapy developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine could serve as a treatment for most blood cancers. Until now, CAR T-based immunotherapy for hematological malignancies has targeted the antigens CD19 for B cells, CD7 for T cells, BCMA for myeloma, and CD33 for AML.
Hanchorbio Inc. and Shanghai Henlius Biotech Inc. have entered into a strategic framework agreement for collaboration to combine Hanchorbio’s protein engineering expertise and proprietary Fc-based designer biologics (FBDB) technology platform with Henlius’ integrated product development and commercialization capabilities.
Adaptative immune response mediated by NKG2D receptor and its ligand NKG2DL could be the clue for CD8-expressing “killer” T cells to kill tumors lacking the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I, according to a group of researchers at Duke University.
Georgiamune Inc. announced that the FDA cleared its IND application for GIM-122, a first-in-class dual-functioning monoclonal antibody designed to target a highly novel mechanism to overcome immunotherapy resistance.
Most drug developers working in the immunotherapy space focus on existing therapeutic targets when developing cancer drugs, optimizing ways of drugging them via engineering modalities such as CAR T-cell approaches, CRISPR editing or antibody-drug conjugates that deliver toxic payloads. The angle of one company – Cartography Biosciences – is the opposite to this. Its modus operandi is to pinpoint the immunological targets first, leveraging tools that already exist, before building therapies around them.
Most drug developers working in the immunotherapy space focus on existing therapeutic targets when developing cancer drugs, optimizing ways of drugging them via engineering modalities such as CAR T-cell approaches, CRISPR editing or antibody-drug conjugates that deliver toxic payloads. The angle of one company – Cartography Biosciences – is the opposite to this. Its modus operandi is to pinpoint the immunological targets first, leveraging tools that already exist, before building therapies around them.
T cells do not have the last word in some breast cancers. According to a study from the University of Pittsburgh, the key to estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast tumors are macrophages, not T cells, and targeting them could prevent immunotherapy failure in this type of cancer.
The traps that neutrophils develop against microorganisms also hold T cells and prevent the success of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer. To free the immune system from itself, scientists at the Istituto Oncologico Veneto in Italy made a key that unlocked this sticky dungeon from an antibody against arginase-1 (ARG1), an enzyme also present in the trap.