What if we could find cancerous tumors years before they can harm us — without expensive screening facilities or even steady electricity? Ludwig MIT’s Sangeeta Bhatia leads a multidisciplinary lab that searches for novel ways to understand, diagnose and treat human disease.
Ludwig’s aim is to support scientific research to ease the suffering caused by cancer. To that end, we fund basic research in the biological sciences, applied research for the design and development of candidate cancer therapies and diagnostics and early stage clinical trials to evaluate new treatments and therapeutic strategies.
Defeat GBM-funded research discovers a completely new process whereby EGFR alterations – which occur in the majority of GBMs – fuel tumor growth, and, importantly, identifies a potential way to exploit these changes in tumor cells to treat GBM using a class of anti-cancer drugs already in development.
Researchers discovered, in mice, the direct progenitors to coronary artery smooth muscle cells, the important component that encases the artery and gives it strength.
In this Q&A, Ludwig MSK’s Alexander Rudensky talks about the function of regulatory T cells, a type of immune cell, and how targeting these cells may eventually lead to new immunotherapy treatments for cancer as well as other types of disease.
Seen as a major breakthrough in cancer treatment, immuno-oncology could be the hope the world has waited for.
The NIH has awarded three grants totaling $31.8 million toward the agency’s new 4D Nucleome Program—a collaborative research initiative aimed at better understanding how DNA is arranged within the cell’s nucleus in four dimensions—three-dimensional space plus time—and how changes in that nuclear organization affect human health and disease.
Owing to successful outcomes from clinical trials, the FDA has approved three immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat certain metastatic melanomas and advanced lung cancers. All current FDA-approved immune checkpoint inhibitors are antibodies. But are antibodies truly the best immune checkpoint inhibitors?
The aim of a conference held earlier this month was to bring together the world’s leading oesophageal cancer experts for the first time. And by getting everyone in one room, our hope was to invigorate research ideas and stimulate progress in understanding and treating the disease.
Among the Conquer Cancer Foundation’s newest supporters, Ludwig Cancer Research is an international community of distinguished scientists dedicated to preventing and controlling cancer. Its emphasis on collaboration and long-term support has fostered its role as a leader in immunotherapy and other challenging aspects of cancer research since its founding in 1971.
Personalised drugs to treat individual people. Yeast-made cereal optimised for your gut flora. And a whole new range of goods made from nature’s materials. These are the promises of bioengineering.
One of the most practical applications of precision medicine lies within the field of pharmacogenomics, a portmanteau of pharmacology and genomics. It is a discipline designed for tailoring drug treatments to an individual’s genetic make-up.
Le Conseil d’Etat vaudois et un institut américain ont annoncé jeudi des dizaines de millions de francs d’investissement pour développer la recherche sur le cancer au CHUV et à l’UNIL.
Treating advanced melanoma patients with two of the new drugs that help their immune systems fight cancer is more effective than using either drug alone, researchers showed in a study released Sunday that expands physicians’ arsenal against the lethal disease and, potentially, other cancers.
Patients with colon and other cancers who have a specific defect in genes needed for DNA repair are far more likely to respond to a new class of drugs such as Merck & Co’s Keytruda, which enlist the immune system to attack tumors, a new study has shown.
Recent clinical data suggest that combination immunotherapy may be the wave of the future. To capitalize on these exciting findings, the scientific, logistical, proprietary and financial hurdles to the clinical testing of combination therapy must be addressed.
New drugs release the body’s own weapons: killer white blood cells called T cells. And that approach is one of several bringing a huge amount of excitement to the field of cancer research, one that can be palpably felt here at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, where researchers are unveiling advances large and small.
As sequencing costs reduce and computing power expands, opportunities abound for scientists to learn about the genetics of cancer.
How exactly genes and environment interact to propel malignancy is only just beginning to be worked out, but one thing is clear: our habits play a big role.
Each new study seems to augment the good news about checkpoint inhibitors. Second-generation versions of these drugs, which lift the brake that tumor cells put on T-cell activation, have gained approval for recurrent melanoma and shown some activity against advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and refractory Hodgkin lymphoma.
Researchers in the National Institutes of Health Roadmap Epigenomics Project have now identified most of the chemical tags on DNA and its associated proteins that influence gene function and help define more than 100 different kinds of human cells. The knowledge of these so-called epigenetic modifications has already led to new insights into Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and development.
A team led by Oxford University researchers was looking at how a protein, iASPP, might be involved in the growth of tumours. However, serendipitously they found that mice lacking this gene died prematurely of sudden cardiac death. More detailed investigations showed that these mice had an irregular conductance in the right side of the heart, a condition known as arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC).
Immunotherapy has shown remarkable gains in treating cancer by harnessing the body’s own immune system, and Dr. Jedd Wolchok of Ludwig MSK is one of the leading researchers in the field.
Jedd D. Wolchok of Ludwig MSK discusses remaining questions regarding immunotherapies for the treatment of melanoma. Despite success, there are several questions that remain. One crucial area, Wolchok says, is the need identify biomarkers to enrich patient populations.
A recent paper does not show that two-thirds of cancer cases are due to bad luck.