As far as clinical use goes, checkpoint inhibitors are furthest along, with four approved therapies and dozens of others wending their way through clinical trials. But perhaps no cancer immunotherapy has captured the public's imagination like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, despite the fact that there are not yet any FDA-approved CAR T cells.
Jedd Wolchok is apparently not one to rest on his laurels. As the principal investigator on the 024 study that led to approval of the first commercially successful cancer immunotherapy, CTLA-4 checkpoint inhibitor Yervoy (ipilimumab, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.) as well as several phase III trials investigating the combination of Yervoy and PD-1 checkpoint blocker Opdivo (nivolumab, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.), Wolchok has done as much as anyone currently working in oncology for patients.
Researchers have isolated a broadly neutralizing antibody (bnAb) to HIV from an infant who had been infected for roughly a year, showing that bnAbs can in principle develop more rapidly than they usually do.
Structural studies published this week indicated there are antigens that would make it feasible to create a broad-spectrum vaccine that would simultaneously protect against both Zika and dengue virus.
In the justified worries about drug resistance, it tends to get somewhat lost that there is, as yet, no completely untreatable superbug. The colistin resistance gene mcr-1 that was detected on plasmids in China and Europe in 2015, and in the US in 2016, has not yet met up with a bacterium that is resistant to all other drugs.
TMEM230 mutations caused familial Parkinson's disease (PD), implicating synaptic vesicle trafficking in the disorder. PD symptoms result from the death of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, but the events leading up to cell death are still poorly understood.
Attendees are accustomed to hearing results from phase III trials of investigational agents at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). And at the 2016 meeting, which ran from June 3-7, there were some of those presentations. But the denizens of McCormick Place found themselves contending with somewhat atypical fare this year, with less than the usual buzz around such trials.
Researchers have developed a method to expand corrected cells in the liver after gene therapy, an approach analogous to bone marrow conditioning that could improve both the efficacy and the safety of gene therapy.
