Aviv Regev speaks with the urgent velocity of someone who has seen the world with an extraordinary new acuity, and can’t wait for you to hurry up and see it too. At a meeting of 460 international scientists gathered last week in San Francisco, the computational biologist bombarded her audience with a torrent of results from her lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is pioneering powerful new tools for understanding what we humans are really made of—and what makes us fall apart. “Where do disease risk genes act?” she fired into the crowd. “Which molecular communications are being disrupted? Which cell programs are being changed? These are the next generation of questions we can now ask.” For centuries, scientists like Regev have known that clues to our elemental humanity were hiding in the basic unit of life: the cell. The cell has captivated scientists ever since Robert Hooke stuck a sliver of cork under his microscope in the 17th … [Read more...] about The Human Cell Atlas Is Biologists’ Latest Grand Project
Adoptive t cell therapy clinical trials
Proof-of-concept HIV Immunotherapy Study Passes Phase 1 Safety Trial
Preliminary results from a phase I clinical trial have demonstrated the safety and tolerability of a cell therapy involving the ex vivo expansion of T cells and their subsequent infusion into HIV-infected individuals previously treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART). The study appears September 21st in the journal Molecular Therapy. "This study is focused on finding a way to re-educate the body's immune system to better fight HIV infection," says co-senior study author David Margolis of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. "We found that this approach of re-educating the immune cells and reinfusing them was safe, which was the primary goal of the study. The data from this trial will continue to help us design improved immunotherapies against HIV." A game changer for patients living with HIV, ART has turned what was once a death sentence into a chronically managed disease. But it is not a cure, and the virus continues to persist within a latent reservoir that … [Read more...] about Proof-of-concept HIV Immunotherapy Study Passes Phase 1 Safety Trial
bluebird bio Reports First Quarter 2018 Financial Results and Highlights Operational Progress
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2018--bluebird bio, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLUE) today reported financial results and business highlights for the first quarter ended March 31, 2018.“Early in 2018, we’ve made important progress against our stated regulatory and commercial goals for the year, including preparing and investing in our team and infrastructure to bring us closer to providing our therapies to patients,” said Nick Leschly, chief bluebird. “Our plans remain on-track for our first regulatory filing in Europe for TDT, we are rapidly advancing development of bb2121 for patients, and we are focused on future innovation platforms.”Recent HighlightsCOMPLETED NORTHSTAR (HGB-204) STUDY – In February 2018, the final patient to be treated in Northstar, the company’s Phase 1/2 study designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of LentiGlobin for the treatment of patients with TDT, reached two years of follow-up. The study, along with data from … [Read more...] about bluebird bio Reports First Quarter 2018 Financial Results and Highlights Operational Progress
Mouse Study Turns T Cells into Liver Cancer Treatment
After exposing genetically manipulated mice to respond to a common antigen found in human liver cancer, Georgia Cancer Center scientists believe they can turn T cells into fighters against the disease. The researchers studied mice engineered to express the human leukocyte antigen, which helps regulate the immune system. The antigen helped the mice produce the powerful T cells against liver cancer. The researchers immunized the mice with the antigen α-fetoprotein, which is found in 70 to 80 percent of human liver cancers, and serves as both a biomarker for diagnosing and a target for treating the sixth most common cancer worldwide. “For the T cell to recognize the tumor cell, it has to have a receptor for that tumor cell," corresponding author Yukai He, PhD, an immunologist at the Georgia Cancer Center and Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, said in a statement. In the study, the team took the genes for the most effective liver … [Read more...] about Mouse Study Turns T Cells into Liver Cancer Treatment
Vaping companies are using the same old tricks as Big Tobacco
Samir Soneji had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to talk about the potential risks of vaping at the first US E-Cigarette Summit in Washington, DC this past May. His first clue was the booing. As a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Soneji studies how gaps in tobacco regulation affect health. Two years before the conference, he’d reported in JAMA Pediatrics that young people who smoke hookah or use “snus,” a form of moist smokeless tobacco, are twice as likely to try cigarettes as kids who don’t. He suspected that e-cigarettes, with kid-friendly flavors like “Cinnamon Roll” and “Peanut Butter Cup,” carried a similar risk. And that’s exactly what he and several colleagues discovered in a recent review of studies that tested that possibility. Evidence that tobacco companies targeted teens and nonsmokers with candy- and fruit-flavored cigarettes prompted the Food and Drug … [Read more...] about Vaping companies are using the same old tricks as Big Tobacco