immune checkpoint inhibitors tagged posts

An experimental mRNA vaccine has boosted the tumor-fighting effects of immunotherapy in a mouse-model study, bringing researchers one step closer to their goal of developing a universal vaccine to “wake up” the immune system against cancer.

Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the University of Florida study showed that like a one-two punch, pairing the test vaccine with common anticancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors triggered a strong antitumor response.

A surprising element, researchers said, was that they achieved the promising results not by attacking a specific target protein expressed in the tumor, but by simply revving up the immune system—spurring it to respond as if fighting a virus...

Researchers at the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center have identified a mechanism that causes severe gastrointestinal problems with immune-based cancer treatment.

They also found a way to deliver immunotherapy’s cancer-killing impact without the unwelcome side effect.

The findings are published in Science.

“This is a good example of how understanding a mechanism helps you to develop an alternative therapy that’s more beneficial. Once we identified the mechanism causing the colitis, we could then develop ways to overcome this problem and prevent colitis while preserving the anti-tumor effect,” said senior study author Gabriel Nunez, M.D., Paul de Kruif Professor of Pathology at Michigan Medicine.

Immunotherapy has emerged as a pr...

Many people don’t realize that the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi residing within the gastrointestinal tract — collectively called the gut microbiome — are connected to overall health, and specifically to cancer.

Manipulating the gut microbiome to produce “beneficial” commensal microbes, which protect the host from pathogens and can boost immune responses, among other things, could potentially help patients respond better to cancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy.

To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new dietary fiber formulation that improves the potency of immunotherapies against cancer by modulating the gut microbiome...