BOSTON – The human brain, Jürgen Knoblich told the audience at the 2017 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), consists of "86 billion neurons that have to be born at the right time, move to the right positions and wire up in the right way."
As medicines have become more potent and patient groups have become more targeted, the need has arisen for cGMP (current good manufacturing practices) processes that are suitable for producing drugs at volumes of kilograms, which is far less than is produced in one manufacturing run by classical batch manufacturing systems.
BOSTON – At the Thursday morning plenary of the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), those who came into the plenary room carrying their morning cup of orange juice turned out to be taking care of their own stem cells.
By treating mice with the messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding a bispecific antibody, rather than with the antibody itself, researchers from the German University of Mainz and Biontech AG have eliminated tumors in mice. In a direct comparison, the mRNA worked as well as the protein antibody did, and needed to be administered less often.
Transmissible endoplasmic reticulum stress (TERS) can spread from one cancer to another and convey resistance to many treatments, including nutrient starvation, the chemotherapy Taxol (paclitaxel) and the proteasome inhibitor Velcade (bortezomib, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.).
CHICAGO – With the firm establishment of immunotherapy, so far in the form of checkpoint blockade, as a pillar of cancer therapy, drug developers are finding themselves with an enviable problem right now: how to pick the most promising of many promising combination strategies to move forward in combination with PD-1 and PD-L1 blockers.
CHICAGO – Loxo Oncology Inc.'s announcement that it will seek tissue-agnostic approval for larotrectinib (LOXO-101) based on data that were presented at this year's ASCO meeting came just weeks after Keytruda (pembrolizumab, Merck & Co. Inc.) was approved for use in MSI-H/dMMR tumors regardless of tumor histology.
CHICAGO — Detailed genomic profiling is a sine qua non of precision medicine, and at tertiary cancer centers, the comprehensive profiling of tumors and matched germline DNA is becoming ever more routine.
