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Category: biotech/medical – Page 19

The International Myeloma Foundation Launches US Myeloma Network to Accelerate Clinical Trials, Expand Access, and Improve Patient Care

This is exciting news!

LOS ANGELES and STUDIO CITY, Calif., Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the International Myeloma Foundation (IMF) announced the launch of the US Myeloma Network (USMN) — a first-of-its-kind national clinical research network designed to accelerate the prevention and cure of multiple myeloma by advancing scientific discovery, expanding access to clinical trials, and ensuring more patients benefit from breakthrough therapies. Johnson & Johnson joins this initiative as the network’s first industry collaborator. The USMN will focus on clinical trials with the potential to change clinical practice across care settings, accelerating the delivery of innovative therapies and new treatment approaches to patients.

The USMN connects leading academic centers, community oncology practices and industry partners through a coordinated national infrastructure designed to streamline trial activation, reduce operational barriers, expand equitable access to clinical trials, and accelerate the development of more effective therapies across the continuum of myeloma care – from prevention and early intervention through relapsed and refractory disease.

“The future of myeloma depends on our ability to bring scientific innovation to patients more quickly and more equitably,” said S. Vincent Rajkumar, MD, Mayo Clinic, Chairperson of the International Myeloma Foundation. “The US Myeloma Network creates an unprecedented opportunity to unite investigators across the country through a coordinated research infrastructure that accelerates clinical trials, expands patient participation, and advances the discoveries that will ultimately lead to the prevention—and one day the cure—of multiple myeloma.”

A precision T-cell therapy stalls treatment-resistant cancers in clinical trial

Early results of the first clinical trial to evaluate the drug invikafusp alfa (invika) in humans indicate that the treatment may be capable of managing cancers that have rebuffed most other interventions, including standard immunotherapy.

A study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Mass General Brigham and Memorial Sloan Kettering found that, at optimal doses, invika was well tolerated and, in patients whose solid tumors had resisted standard immunotherapy, halted disease progression in most and shrank tumors in some. The work is published in the journal Nature Medicine.

“Patients whose tumors are advanced—particularly tumors that don’t respond well to immunotherapy—often have their backs against a wall. Few options remain once you reach that point, but these results highlight a more precise means of stimulating antitumor immunity that could provide another solution,” said co-corresponding author James Gulley, clinical director at the Center for Cancer Research (CCR), part of NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI).

DNA programs a cell-free material to build its own motors and move

Researchers have created a material that manufactures the proteins responsible for cell movement, without needing intact living cells. By embedding cell-free gene expression into a thin sheet of protein filaments, they were able to make the material wrinkle, rise into blister-like shapes and break into bundles that flow around one another.

The instructions driving these transformations are built into the material itself—in DNA. Changing the genetic program made the filaments sustain flowing motion, stop after a burst of activity or repeatedly speed up and slow down.

The study, published in Nature Materials, demonstrates mechanical behavior that is “genetically programmed and executed autonomously,” as the authors describe it. Once assembled, the material can change its activity without researchers intervening at each step.

Bacteria reinvent their weapons through selection, chance and gene swapping

Many of the most potent antibiotics originate from bacteria. A large proportion belong to a class of compounds known as nonribosomal peptides (NRP). They are produced by large bacterial enzyme machineries—the nonribosomal peptide synthetases, or NRPS for short. These function like molecular assembly lines: Similar to the stations in a car factory, where new parts are added to the car at each step, several specialized modules string together amino acid by amino acid to build a peptide.

The finished product is used in nature as a weapon in microbial competition—and by us humans, chemically optimized, as an active ingredient in medicines. The research group of Helge Bode at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology aims to engineer the NRPS machinery at the genetic level to create entirely new drug candidates. Their latest paper, “Drift, selection and recombination bias drive the evolution of a non-ribosomal peptide,” is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Like ordinary proteins, NRPs are subject to evolution—but the way they change is unusual. While ordinary proteins evolve mainly through random mutations of individual DNA building blocks, NRPS exchange entire gene segments with one another. This process is called recombination. The result is new combinations of modules—and thus new peptides with altered chemical properties.

Southampton scientists explore immune cell reprogramming to fight common viruses

Scientists have started work on a new way to fight cold and flu viruses by reprogramming the cells in our immune system to respond faster to infections.

Experts at the University of Southampton are developing a type of white blood cell, called killer cells, with a pre-installed memory of how to fight off respiratory diseases.

It is a different approach to traditional jabs, which contain a weakened and harmless pathogen used to train the immune system to destroy future infections.