immunotherapy tagged posts

This March 2016 photo provided by the City of Hope hospital shows patient Richard Grady in Duarte, Calif. Suffering from a deadly brain cancer that had spread to his spine, a novel therapy, which helped his immune system attack his disease, shrank his tumors. Grady was the first person to get cells that were genetically modified to seek and kill cancer dripped through a tube into a space in the brain where spinal fluid is made, sending the cells down the path the cancer traveled to his spine. (City of Hope via AP)

A man with deadly brain cancer that had spread to his spine saw his tumors shrink and, for a time, completely vanish after a novel treatment to help his immune system attack his disease—another first in this promising field...

This diagram describes how the device Dr. Hood helped to develop is implanted into a cancerous tumor. Credit: Lyle Hood/UTSA

Medicine diffusion capsule could locally treat multiple ailments and diseases over several weeks. This new device that could revolutionize the delivery of medicine. “The problem with most drug-delivery systems is that you have a specific minimum dosage of medicine that you need to take for it to be effective,” Hood said. “There’s also a limit to how much of the drug can be present in your system so that it doesn’t make you sick.”

As a result of these limitations, a person who needs frequent doses of a specific medicine is required to take a pill every day or visit a doctor for injections. Hood’s creation negates the need for either of these approaches...

Regulatory DC immunotherapy can be effective for food allergies and suggest that induction of Foxp3− regulatory T cells might be a useful strategy for tolerance induction in this context.

A new immunotherapy technique has been developed that nearly eliminates the allergic response to peanut and egg white proteins in food-allergic mice, reducing the anaphylactic response by up to 90% with only one treatment. The findings open the door to test this new allergy treatment in “humanized mice” – mice with non-existent immune systems implanted with cells from a human immune system, eg, from a peanut-allergic person. With Health Canada approval, the first human trial could begin in about one year, Gordon said.

“If we can reliably ‘cure’ food allergies, or related conditions such as asthma or aut...

Engineering T cells to treat pancreatic cancer Researchers hope to have a human version of the T cell in clinical trials this year

Hingorani, a pancreatic cancer specialist, teamed up with Fred Hutch immunotherapy experts Drs. Phil Greenberg and Ingunn Stromnes in successful efforts to breach the cancer’s physical and immunological walls using immunotherapy, a type of treatment that harnesses or refines the body’s own immune system with T-cells engineered to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

Specifically, Hingorani’s team created T cells with a high ffinity to a “relatively” tumor-specific antigen. Why relatively? Notoriously difficult pancreatic tumor cells don’t produce many unique proteins that allow for completely tumor-specific T cells...