A potent anti-cancer therapy has been created using Nobel prize-winning "click chemistry", where molecules click together like LEGO bricks, in a new study by UCL and Stanford University researchers.

The study, published in Nature Chemistry, opens up new possibilities for how cutting-edge cancer immunotherapies might be built in future.

In February 2023, the IciStem consortium, which includes Asier Sáez-Cirión's team at the Institut Pasteur, published details in Nature Medicine of a third case of HIV remission after a bone marrow transplant, involving the Düsseldorf patient. A total of 5 individuals (the Berlin, London, Düsseldorf, New York and City of Hope patients) are now considered as having probably been cured of HIV infection after receiving a bone marrow transplant.

Brest cancer is the most common cancer in women. Among breast tumors that spread to other organs (develop metastasis), 70% belong to a variant, called luminal, whose cells are sensitive to the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone. In fact, the tumor forms when these hormones order the cells to divide. The usual treatment for advanced cases is surgery, followed by hormone therapy, alone or in combination with chemotherapy or targeted therapy.

While pembrolizumab is an approved treatment for patients with stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), only some patients respond to this therapy. Treatment failure, researchers say, is often caused by differences in the tumor microenvironment. An ongoing phase II study (KEYNOTE-495/KeyImPaCT) led by a researcher at Yale Cancer Center reveals that combining pembrolizumab with other treatments reduced the size of target tumors, resulting in a higher response rate for patients with advanced NSCLC.

In a world-first clinical trial published in the journal Nature Medicine, a multi-centre study from Lawson Health Research Institute, the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) and the Jewish General Hospital (JGH) has found fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) from healthy donors are safe and show promise in improving response to immunotherapy in patients with advanced melanoma.

New insights explaining why some children have a longer remission than others after having cutting-edge CAR T-cell therapy for leukaemia have been revealed by researchers at UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

The collaborative research project, published in Nature Medicine, combines expertise in novel immune therapy design and state-of-the-art computational analysis to identify a genetic signature of CAR T-cells that will be the most effective in the long term.

"Listen, if there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us is that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but... life finds a way," said Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, the 1993 science fiction film about a park with living dinosaurs.