Using dual lasers and an advanced gas injection system, researchers at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center (BELLA) accelerated a high-quality electron beam to 10 billion electronvolts (10 GeV) over a distance of just 30 centimeters.
Laser-plasma accelerators have the potential to dramatically shrink the size and cost of particle accelerators, benefiting fields such as high-energy physics, medicine, and materials science. Key achievements from BELLA’s recent experiment include:
A team of Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) scientists has identified a new method for producing a therapeutic product that has the potential to improve the treatment of cancer.
The work by Associate Professor Leszek Lisowski and his Translational Vectorology Research Unit is published in the journal Molecular Therapy.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, also known as CAR T therapies, are a relatively new form of treatment showing very exciting results for several types of cancer. While initially validated for the treatment of B cell malignancies, especially acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the technology has also shown promise for other cancer types, including solid tumors.
Through its commitment to international nuclear nonproliferation — a mission focused on limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and sensitive technology while working to promote peaceful use of nuclear science and technology — the United States maintains a constant vigilance aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism worldwide.
With extensive research into both basic and applied uranium science, as well as internationally deployed operational solutions, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is uniquely positioned to contribute its comprehensive capabilities toward advancing the U.S. nonproliferation mission.
In 1943, seemingly overnight, ORNL emerged from a rural Tennessee valley as the site of the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor, in support of U.S. efforts to end World War II. ORNL’s mission soon shifted into peacetime applications, harnessing nuclear science for medical treatments, power generation and breakthroughs in materials, biological and computational sciences.
Scientists have discovered a key protein that helps cancer cells avoid detection by the immune system during a type of advanced therapy.
By creating a new drug that blocks this protein, researchers hope to make cancer treatments more effective, especially for hard-to-treat blood cancers. This breakthrough could lead to better survival rates and fewer relapses for patients.
Scientists at City of Hope, one of the leading cancer research and treatment centers in the U.S., have uncovered a key factor that allows cancer cells to evade CAR T cell therapy.
Researchers at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa have discovered that a virus, FloV-SA2, encodes one of the proteins needed to make ribosomes, the central engines in all cells that translate genetic information into proteins, the building blocks of life. This is the first eukaryotic virus (a virus that infects eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, fungi) found to encode such a protein.
The research is published in the journal npj Viruses.
Viruses are packets of genetic material surrounded by a protein coating. They replicate by getting inside of a cell where they take over the cell’s replication machinery and direct it to make more viruses. Simple viruses depend almost exclusively on material and machinery provided by the host cell, but larger, more complex viruses code for numerous proteins to aid in their own replication.
As the amount of genomic data grows, so too does the challenge of organizing it into a usable database. Indeed, the lack of a searchable database of genomic information from the literature has posed a challenge to the research community. Now, Genomenon’s AI-based approach—the Genomenon Genomic Graph (G3) knowledgebase—combines patient and biological data from nearly all published scientific and medical studies, including demographics, clinical characteristics, phenotypes, treatments, outcomes, and disease-associated genes and variants.
Training of the underlying large language model for G3 uses Genomenon’s proprietary, curated genomic datasets. The knowledgebase will power AI-driven predictive models for clinical diagnostics and drug development applications.
The Ann Arbor, MI, based Genomenon—a provider of genomic intelligence solutions—notes that this advancement represents the first time that content from the entire corpus of clinically relevant literature will be captured in a single, searchable knowledgebase.
📝 — Sheikh, et al.
In this paper, the authors summarize the current practice and the latest progress of CD19 auto-CAR T cell therapy and the management of specific toxicities and discuss the place of allogeneic CAR T development in this setting.
Full text is available 👇
While more than half of non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHL) can be cured with modern frontline chemoimmunotherapy regimens, outcomes of relapsed and/or refractory (r/r) disease in subsequent lines remain poor, particularly if considered ineligible for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Hence, r/r NHLs represent a population with a high unmet medical need. This therapeutic gap has been partially filled by adoptive immunotherapy. CD19-directed autologous chimeric antigen receptor (auto-CAR) T cells have been transformative in the treatment of patients with r/r B cell malignancies. Remarkable response rates and prolonged remissions have been achieved in this setting, leading to regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of four CAR T cell products between 2017 and 2021.