cancer, immunology

A new study reveals an unexpected role for the immune cells and a previously unknown mechanism for the wasting syndrome.

An early-stage clinical study finds that none of the 25 patients treated developed neurotoxicity or cytokine release syndrome, common hazards of the cancer immunotherapy.

Researchers describe ways to study how cancer cells evade therapies that harness the immune system.

The technology has wowed the field by all but obliterating some patients’ blood cancers, but solid malignancies present new challenges.

Tumor accessibility, heterogeneity, and microenvironment vary between the two classes of malignancies.

This year’s winners also include the developers of nusinersen, an oligonucleotide therapeutic for spinal muscular atrophy.

The immunologists, honored with the 2018 award in Physiology or Medicine, pioneered immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

The promise of immunotherapy is real. We now need to figure out how to maximize the number of patients the approach benefits.

Stem-cell–derived natural killer cells engineered in a similar way to CAR-T cells may pave the way to “off the shelf” cancer therapies that aren’t patient-specific.

Drugs approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis block cytokines, the molecules responsible for severe side effects from the immunotherapy, and reduce symptoms in mice.

The immunotherapy eliminated a woman’s metastatic lesions and kept her disease-free for two years.

Merck’s Keytruda extended the lives of lung cancer patients by several months and appeared to stop the progression of advanced melanoma.  

Sequencing of a single gene can spot patients with a dangerous form of mycosis fungoides better than other prognostic tests.  

Genetic analyses uncover cellular hallmarks of bladder cancer tumors that don’t respond, but interfering with one of those characteristics in a mouse model causes tumors to shrink.