ACS Honorees 2023: Roy de Souza & Aisha de Sequeira, in memoriam

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Can we cure cancer with a vaccine?

Big pharma and biotech companies have invested billions in new ways to cure cancer. But for tough metastatic cancers (those that have spread throughout the body), they have mostly not succeeded. Most of the drug discovery efforts look for chemicals that will kill the cancer cells themselves. That is a good strategy. However using the

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Physical detection of HLA-C binding peptides to identify and predict immunogenic personal neoepitopes for improving cancer vaccines

Peptides bound to class I HLA molecules (HLA-A, -B and ?C) arise from endogenous or foreign proteins that are cleaved by the proteasome and peptidases of the endoplasmic reticulum prior to loading and display by surface HLA class I proteins. Each HLA allele is estimated to bind and present ~1,000-10,000 unique peptides to T cells.

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Immunogenomic analytical approaches for research and clinical applications

One of the critical steps to developing curative and tumor-specific immunotherapies is the identification and selection of antigens with tumor-restricted expression in order to avoid undesirable immune responses against normal tissues. Proteins with tumor-specific mutations have the potential to be the most restricted of all tumor antigens. However, the comprehensive identification of such `neoantigens’ has

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What are CAR t-cells

As far back as the 1980s, when AIDS was rampant and regularly taking the lives of young people, we understood the importance of T-cells and the immune system. Now, as we deal with what has emerged another near- epidemic of cancer in the developed world, it is logical to assume that T-cells can be useful

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NSAIDs and Cancer

It’s not news that aspirin and NSAIDS may prevent colon cancer and even inhibit cancer metastasis. The reason we continue to say “may” is that the different studies have different results, and the medical community does not want everybody at risk to begin self-dosing because of the risk of internal intestinal bleeding. Both NSAIDs and

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Immunotherapy in Lung Cancer

Although we’re still somewhat early in the game, the latest clinical trial for immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy for lung cancer has just been released with exciting results. Non-small cell lung cancer is the leading cause of all cancer death, in part because in the majority of cases, the cancer has already spread at the time

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Igniting the Immune System

As immunotherapy becomes recognized as a first line treatment for cancer, others outside of oncology are also researching how to strengthen the immune system both for cancer treatment and for cancer prevention. This line of thought corresponds with the relatively new field of epigenetics, a subset of genomics that studies how genes can be turned

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