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Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, Selected for STAT's 2024 STATUS List
Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, president and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is named to STAT's 2024 STATUS List, featuring 50 influential people shaping the future of health and life sciences across biotech, medicine, health care, policy, and health tech.
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Dana-Farber Researchers Receive AACR 2024 Scientific Achievement Awards
Christopher D.M. Fletcher, MD, Timothy R. Rebbeck, PhD, David Pellman, MD, and Gordon J. Freeman, PhD, will be recognized by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) with 2024 Scientific Achievement Awards.
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Dana-Farber CEO Laurie Glimcher Has Always Been a Trail-Blazer and a Risk-Taker
Dr. Laurie Glimcher learned early on from her father, a prominent physician-researcher, that success in science was built on a basic principle: Big discoveries require big risks.
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Antibody-Drug Conjugates: A Cancer Therapy Revolution
Dana-Farber researchers explore how a novel therapy may benefit patients
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Immunotherapy for Cancer: What it Is, How it Works, and Where it’s Going
Immunotherapy refers to treatments that use the body’s immune system to combat diseases. Immuno-oncology focuses on efforts to use the immune system as a weapon against cancer. The immune system is a collection of organs, tissues, specialized cells, and substances that protect the body against infection and disease. While the immune system can often handle very small tumors on its own, either by destroying them or keeping them from growing, it can sometimes fail — either because a tumor grows too large, the cancer cells are too well camouflaged, or the tumor cells are able to stave off an immune system attack. A key discovery, made by Dana-Farber’s Gordon Freeman, PhD, and others, was that the immune system’s attack on cancer often falls short because many cancer cells display proteins, called immune checkpoint proteins, that bring the attack to a halt.
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Melanoma Vaccine: Progress and Possibility
A melanoma therapeutic vaccine is a type of personalized cancer vaccine that is intended to train the immune system to fight cancer cells in a way that lasts many years. These novel vaccines are personally tailored to recognize the mutations present in an individual’s tumor cells. They are different from vaccines for infectious diseases, which are typically given to as many people as possible in a community to prevent a virus from spreading. Currently, no personalized melanoma vaccines are approved medicines, though several have been tested in clinical trials. A personalized RNA vaccine has recently shown promising data in patients with high-risk melanoma.
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Immunotherapy Post-Surgery Improves Overall Survival For Kidney Cancer
For the first time in fifty years, results from a phase 3 randomized, placebo-controlled trial have shown an overall survival benefit from an adjuvant therapy in patients with kidney cancer. Treatment with pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, after surgery significantly prolonged overall survival in patients with clear-cell renal-cell carcinoma (ccRCC) at high risk for recurrence, according to an analysis of results from the KEYNOTE-564 study. Pembrolizumab was associated with a 38% reduction in risk of death compared with placebo.
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Kate Dibble, PhD Discusses Ovarian Function Suppression
Dana-Farber's Heather Parsons, MD, MPH, discusses a new study showing liquid biopsy could reliably determine whether a patient's breast cancer is HER2-positive or --negative.
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Paolo Tarantino, MD Discusses RELIEVE Study
Dana-Farber's Paolo Tarantino, MD, presented results from the RELIEVE study showing patients with metastatic breast cancer receiving trastuzumab deruxtecan fared best if they had HER2+ disease or stable HER2-low disease.
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Heather Parsons, MD, MPH Discusses Liquid Biopsy
Dana-Farber's Heather Parsons, MD, MPH, discusses a new study showing liquid biopsy could reliably determine whether a patient's breast cancer is HER2-positive or --negative.
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Psilocybin Eases Depression in Patients with Cancer, Study Finds
For patients with cancer who are suffering from major depression, treatment with psilocybin plus individual and group psychological support can significantly relieve depressive symptoms, a clinical trial has found. In a companion study led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators, trial participants said the treatment experience with psilocybin – a hallucinogenic compound derived from certain mushrooms – created a sense of connection, meaning, and transcendence that aided the healing process.
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Exploring How CAR T-Cell Therapy May Help More Patients
CAR T-cell therapy burst onto the scene as a revolutionary treatment for cancer patients in 2015, when it was introduced in clinical trials primarily for patients with lymphoma and leukemia. Since then, it has transformed the course of disease, primarily for blood cancer patients, with many clinical trials now exploring the approach for solid tumor patients. Through this highly tailored form of immune effector cell (IEC) therapy, typically a patient's own immune cells — known as T cells — are genetically re-engineered to identify and kill cancer cells.