ATLANTA – Nineteen years to the day after the activation of the JAK/STAT pathway by interferon was first described in the Dec. 9, 1993, issue of Nature, scientists at Incyte Corp. described the pathway from that description to the first approved inhibitor of the JAK/STAT pathway, Jakafi (ruxolitinib, Incyte Corp) at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting last week.
Michele de Luca, of the University of Modena's Center for Regenerative Medicine, introduced himself in an unusual fashion for a plenary speaker at a hematology convention. "I have nothing to do with blood," he told his audience at Tuesday's Presidential Symposium on stem cells at the American Society of Hematology's (ASH) annual meeting.
ATLANTA – The American Society of Hematology's (ASH) annual meeting embraces, more than many other conferences, both the basic research and the clinical treatment side of diseases their members focus on.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is named for what it does not have. This subtype of breast cancer does not express estrogen receptors, the progesterone receptor, or HER2/neu. That classification, though, doesn't give doctors any clues as to what might actually work to fight it – only what won't.
The relationship between cancer, cancer treatments, inflammation and immunity had another layer of complexity added to it with the report this week that chemotherapy can contribute to promoting tumor growth via activating the inflammasome in some types of immune system cells, which ultimately led to angiogenesis.
Arguments have gone back and forth for some time now on whether cancer cells use a developmental program called the epithelial to mesenchymal transition, or EMT, to metastasize.
If you have to run a marathon, do it as a relay. That, apparently, is the immune system's solution to dealing with chronic infections, a study published in the Nov. 30, 2012, issue of Science suggested.
Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and when I reflect on AIDS, I generally do it with a sense of amazement about how far we have come in the treatment of HIV since AIDS first came to the attention of the U.S. medical establishment, in form of a cluster of pneumocystis pneumonia infections in young men, in 1981. An AIDS-free generation is no longer a pipe dream. With all the progress that’s being made, though, I’ve been struck how one thing that seems to keep receding into the distance – like a manifestation of the joke that the future is...
Oncolytic viruses have aspects that are similar to both cancer immunotherapy and of gene therapy. As with gene therapy, the basic idea behind oncolytic viral therapy is to make a virus that will specifically infect certain cells.
