2018
April
AACR Annual Meeting 2018: Driving Innovative Cancer Science to Patient Care
April 25, 2018
Last week, the ACIR team attended the AACR Annual Meeting 2018 in Chicago. This week’s extensive special feature covers select sessions from the conference. We have organized the content by topics below. Immune Checkpoint BlockadeNeoantigen TargetingImmune Cell AgonismMetabolismImmune Cell BiologyAdoptive Cell Transfer Immune Checkpoint Blockade The AACR Annual Meeting 2018 opened with a...
Mast cells subvert immune response in prostate cancer
April 18, 2018
Motivated by the limited response to immunotherapy among prostate cancer patients, Jachetti et al. explored the potential immunosuppressive role of mast cells in a paper recently published in Cancer Immunology Research. Mast cells are innate immune cells that promote angiogenesis and tumorigenesis, and they are known to promote the development of adenocarcinoma in...
Unlocking OX40 agonism
April 11, 2018
Immunotherapies have achieved clinical success in a variety of cancers, but there is still much to be desired in terms of consistent and robust antitumor immunity. In their paper published recently in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Oberst et al. propose targeting the TNF receptor superfamily co-stimulatory receptor OX40. Their engineered OX40 ligand (OX40L) Fc...
Neoepitope-specific T cells come out of hiding in ovarian cancer
April 4, 2018
With broadening the application of personalized immunotherapy in mind, Bobisse et al. set out to identify neoepitope-specific CD8+ T cells in patients with recurrent advanced epithelial ovarian cancer, a type of tumor known to have a low mutational burden. The researchers analyzed peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) from 19 patients...
CAR-T Congress USA March 21-22, 2018, Boston, MA
April 3, 2018
This two-day conference brought together experts from academia and industry representing research, clinical development, and process development to examine and highlight the advances and challenges that come with the first regulatory approvals for CAR T cell therapy. The ACIR team attended several talks, highlighted below. Laurence Cooper MD PhD (Ziopharm) began the meeting...
