The immune system possesses legions of T cells that, if they were primed, could hunt down and destroy tumors. Now, a UC San Francisco team has invented a way to do this by combining immune cells that are grown in the lab with samples from a patient’s tumor. 

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) neurosurgeon Hai Sun, MD, PhD, has been awarded a five-year, $2.9 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support a groundbreaking study aimed at improving the accuracy of pre-surgical mapping and planning for patients who seek surgery as a treatment option for epilepsy. RWJUH is a RWJBarnabas Health facility.

Patients with sickle cell disease are often hesitant to undergo transformative gene therapy — the current lengthy process requires multiple hospital visits to collect enough stem cells. Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital have helped smooth the road to gene therapy with a new approach that collects enough of the patient’s stem cells in a single hospital admission for most patients, improving the turnaround time for genetically altering and infusing the cells back into the patient. The long-term follow-up results of the first-in-human pilot phase I clinical trial are published recently in Blood.

U-M researchers developing the first microbiome-based oral nanomedicine that boosts cancer immunotherapy in mice