As it expands from oncology into autoimmune disease, Cullinan Therapeutics (formerly Cullinan Oncology) yesterday announced a $280 million private placement. The company’s lead compound is now CLN-978 for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which it believes has the potential to be a safe, first-in-class, off-the-shelf, disease-modifying treatment in autoimmune diseases.  “Today’s announcements represent a major step forward for Cullinan Therapeutics…we believe that CLN-978 could offer a convenient modality and potentially disease-modifying treatment for patients with autoimmune diseases ..read more

One of the largest studies to date shows AI-assisted image analysis can detect 90% of cases of lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system. The Scandinavian study used a model called Lars, (Lymphoma Artificial Reader System)—a deep learning system based on artificial intelligence.   Lymphoma is one of the most common cancers in the United States, accounting for about 4% of all cancers. All subjects in this study were current or former lymphoma patients, diagnosed histologically. “We used former patients with negative follow-up scans as our negative cases, i.e. former lymphoma patients ..read more

Researchers led by Didier Trono’s group at EPFL have uncovered a crucial survival tactic employed by cancer cells. The scientists identified a group of proteins, known as KRAB zinc finger proteins (KZFPs), that help cancer cells maintain genetic stability and avoid immune system detection. The team’s findings are published in Cancer Research. “Heterochromatin loss and genetic instability enhance cancer progression by favoring clonal diversity, yet uncontrolled replicative stress leads to mitotic catastrophe and inflammatory responses that promote immune rejection,” the researchers wrote. “KRAB ..read more

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reporting Wednesday in the journal Nature, say they have developed a new technique to encode human T cells with a mutation found in malignant T cells that cause lymphoma, which investigators say is 100 times more potent at killing cancer cells than current treatments. Further, the investigators note that while current immunotherapies have shown very limited success against solid tumors, their engineered T cells were able to kill tumors derived from skin, lung, and stomach in mouse models, without a ..read more

In a crucial Phase I/II trial, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have reported significant success in treating patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell malignancies using cord blood-derived chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cell therapy targeting CD19. The findings, published in Nature Medicine, show a notable overall response rate (OR) of 48.6 percent at 100 days post-treatment, with one-year progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) rates of 32 percent and 68 percent, respectively. Importantly, the trial demonstrated an exce ..read more

An international study has shown that Hodgkin lymphoma recurrence and drug response can be predicted using the levels of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in a patient’s blood. The Stanford Medicine-led research, reported in Nature, examined hundreds of samples from patients with classic Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) and suggests that profiling using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) could potentially let some patients who are predicted to have favorable outcomes forgo lengthy treatment. The study also, surprisingly, revealed that Hodgkin lymphoma—a cancer of the lymph nodes—can be divided into two groups, e ..read more

A chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy with a new cellular binding mechanism targeting CD19 has achieved good results in a Phase I trial in patients with relapsed or refractory B cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As reported in the journal Molecular Cancer, the new therapy had an overall response rate of 91.7% in 12 patients, but this increased to 100% in the two higher dose groups. “CD19-directed CAR T-cell therapies have shown impressive clinical outcomes in CD19+ B-cell malignancies. However, a significant fraction of patients still fails to achieve a complete response (CR) or eventual ..read more

Research hospital Seattle Children’s announced today the spinout of its for-profit company BrainChild Bio, Inc., which will develop CAR T-cell therapies targeting pediatric central nervous system (CNS) cancers. Underpinning the new company will be a license to the CAR T-cell technology that has been developed at Seattle Children’s and will look to accelerate the CAR T-cell therapy and clinical translational efforts of Michael Jensen, MD, and others at Seattle Children’s Therapeutics. Seattle Children’s Therapeutics, launched in 2012, has managed clinical trials of advanced immunotherapies for ..read more

University of Chicago researchers have identified a nutrient derived from beef, lamb, and dairy products that could enhance cancer therapies. Hao Fan and co-authors report in Nature that the long-chain fatty acid trans-vaccenic acid (TVA) promotes the tumor-infiltrating and cytotoxic functions of CD8+ T cells and “has high translational potential as a dietary element in therapeutic approaches to improve clinical outcomes of diverse anti-cancer therapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, T cell engagers and CAR-T and T cell receptor T cell therapy.” The investigators identified TVA when the ..read more

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian have identified a surprising mechanism that ultimately allows for DNA repair in cancer cells and in their both fundamental research and clinical studies have found a combination of chemotherapies that address these treatment-resistant lymphomas. Details of this approach, which is published in the journal Cancer Research, centered on diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), but is likely applicable to other cancers as well. DLBCL affects roughly 30,000 every year in the U.S. and is the most common form of the disease. First line th ..read more