Health forums were abuzz in 2007 with news that a simple, inexpensive chemical, [b]dichloroacetate[/b] (DCA), may be a viable treatment for many forms of cancer. Now, [s]HealthCanal[/s] reports, researchers at the [b]University of Georgia[/b], published in the [b]American Chemical Society's[/b] journal [s]ACS Chemical Biology[/s], have discovered a new way to deliver DCA. ‘DCA shows great promise as a potential cancer treatment, but the drug doesn't find and attack cancer cells very efficiently in the doses researchers are testing,’ said Prof Shanta Dhar of UGA. ‘We have developed a new compound based on DCA that is three orders of magnitude more potent than standard treatments.’
Celldex Ther apeutics[/b] has announced that final data from its Phase 1 study of [b]CDX-1401[/b] in solid tumours, including long-term patient follow-up, have been published in [s]Science Translational Medicine[/s]. [s]Medical Xpress[/s] reports that the data demonstrate robust antibody and T cell responses and evidence of clinical benefit in patients with very advanced cancers and suggest that CDX-1401 may predispose patients to better outcomes on subsequent therapy with checkpoint inhibitors. CDX-1401 is an off-the-shelf vaccine.
University of Adelaide[/b] researchers have discovered that a new trial vaccine offers the most promising treatment to date for melanoma that has spread, with increased patient survival rates and improved ability to stop or reverse the cancer, reports [s]Medical Xpress[/s]. The vaccine, known as [b]vaccinia melanoma cell lysate[/b] (VMCL), was given regularly as a treatment to 54 South patients with advanced, inoperable melanoma over a 10-year period. The study has been in the [s]Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer[/s]. Australia has the highest skin cancer incident rate in the world and the highest rate of melanoma.
Scientists have uncovered a new way the immune system may fight cancers and viral infections that could aid efforts to use immune cells to treat illness, reports [s]Medical Xpress[/s]. The research, in mice, suggests that some organs have the immunological equivalent of ‘neighbourhood police’ – spec ialised squads of defenders that patrol only one area, a single organ, instead of an entire city, the body. Scientists at [b]Washington University School of Medicine[/b] in St Louis have shown that the liver, skin and uterus each has dedicated immune cells, which they call tissue-resident natural killer cells. Other organs may have similar arrangements. Their study, published in [s]eLife[/s], disproves the long-held assumption that all natural killer cells roam the body to provide the first line of defence against cancers and viruses.
[link url=http://www.healthcanal.com/cancers/49866-uga-researchers-develop-new-drug-formulation-for-cancer-treatment.html]Full HealthCanal report[/link]
[link url=http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/cb400944y]ACSB full study[/link]
[link url=http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-cancer-vaccine-approach-dendritic-cells.html]Full Medical Xpress report[/link]
[link url=http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/232/232ra51.abstract?sid=157cf7a3-889e-4062-8ca4-1f926060b68f]STM abstract[/link]
[link url=http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-survival-melanoma-patients-vaccine.html]Full Medical Xpress report[/link]
[link url=http://www.immunotherapyofcancer.org/content/pdf/2051-1426-2-9.pdf]JITC full study[/link]
[link url=http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-immune-cells-defend.html]Full Medical Xpress report[/link]
[link url=http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e01659]eLife abstract[/link]