cancer therapies Archives

CRISPR gene editing: Can we make cancer cells easier to kill?

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Researchers at the Gene Editing Institute have developed a CRISPR gene editing tool to disable genes causing resistance to standard care in cancer patients.

Lung cancer accounts for approximately one in five cancer deaths globally. The high death toll makes the development of new treatments and improvement of old ones a top priority. One of the challenges with traditional chemotherapy is that tumours can develop resistance to treatment. For several years, Eric B Kmiec, PhD, at the Gene Editing Institute of ChristianaCare, USA and […]

The flipside of DNA: Flipons and alternative nucleic acid structures

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Alan Herbert investigates how conserved microRNAs and flipons shape gene expression during development by altering promoter conformations.

DNA sequences called flipons can adopt alternative DNA structures. New research suggests that they have important biological roles. In a quest to further unravel the mystery of these dynamic DNA elements, Dr Alan Herbert, InsideOutBio Inc, USA, and colleagues have spent years conducting experiments at the cutting edge of genomic and molecular science. Now, they demonstrate that by targeting flipons, […]

Trastuzumab-based therapeutics: Choosing the appropriate species for safety studies

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Dr Gail Lewis Phillips researches trastuzumab based therapies and argues that rodents are not the best choice for safety studies as the equivalent antigen (neu) does not bind

Trastuzumab is a clinically approved monoclonal antibody therapy which targets HER2 (or ErbB2) for treatment of HER2-overexpressing breast and gastric cancers. Safety studies are important in the development of antibody therapeutics and should use animal species which bind the target antigen (HER2) to understand target-mediated effects, in addition to a non-binding species to observe non-targeted effects. It is acknowledged that […]