Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor. Their findings identify macrophages that express high levels of CD73, a surface enzyme that’s a vital piece of an immunosuppressive molecular pathway. The strong presence of the CD73 macrophages was unique to glioblastoma among five tumor...

Hydrogels for healing, synthesized from the molecules up by Rice University bioengineers, are a few steps closer to the clinic. Rice researchers and collaborators at Texas Heart Institute (THI) have established a baseline set of injectable hydrogels that promise to help heal wounds, deliver drugs, and treat cancer. Critically, they’ve analyzed how the chemically distinct hydrogels provoke the body’s inflammatory response — or not.   Hydrogels developed at Rice are designed to be injectable and create a...

A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center demonstrated a potential new approach to treating two of the most common subtypes of lymphoma through manipulation of molecular programs controlled by the cAMP-response element-binding protein (CREBBP). Mutations of CREBBP are frequently found in follicular lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL) and allow malignant cells to hide from the immune system.   Co-lead investigators, Michael Green, Ph.D., assistant professor of Lymphoma & Myeloma at MD Anderson and Ari Melnick, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medical...

A one-year follow-up study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed a majority of patients with mantle cell lymphoma resistant to prior therapies may benefit from treatment with CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.   The multi-center, Phase II study reported that 93% of patients responded to the CAR T-cell therapy, with 67% achieving a complete response. Forty-three percent of the first 28 patients treated are still in remission over...

A study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that treatment combining lower doses of chemotherapy with the monoclonal antibody inotuzumab ozogamicin (INO), with or without the drug blinatumomab, is safe and effective in patients over 60 years of age who were newly diagnosed with a high-risk form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) known as Philadelphia chromosome-negative ALL.   “This study demonstrated that reduced-intensity chemotherapy, when combined with INO, resulted in...

A new study by researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston uncovered new information on why the Ebola virus can exert such catastrophic effects on the infected person. They’ve described for the first time how the virus disables T cells, an important line of immune defense, thus rendering the infected person less able to combat the infection. Ebola virus disease is one of the most devastating infectious diseases known to exist, with previous outbreaks...

The search for effective biological tools is a marathon, not a sprint, even when the distances are on the microscale. A discovery at Rice University on how engineered communities of cells communicate is a long step in the right direction. The Rice Lab of synthetic biologist transcriptional circuits that, when added to (and expressed by) the genomes of single-cell microbes, allows them to quickly form a network of local interactions to spur collective action, even...