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A diagnosis of cancer still strikes fear into many people. It’s true that some malignancies that would once have been death sentences are becoming more manageable. But, cancer remains a massive threat — it’s the second biggest cause of death, worldwide, killing almost 10 million people annually. And this is the situation after decades of often stunning medical advances. But researchers are closing in on a number of cancer-fighting strategies that are bringing new hope to the millions affected by the disease.
This collection will be updated at the end of May with reporting from journalists.
Brody and colleagues discuss the current status and potential of cancer vaccines, highlighting challenges and opportunities to advance promising candidates to the clinic.
In the final report of a phase 1/2 trial evaluating allogeneic CD19-specific CAR-NK cells armored with IL-15 in patients with CD19+ hematologic malignancies, the therapy was shown to be safe and efficacious with distinct cord blood features associated with response.
Here the authors review CAR T cell engineering and immunotherapy for cancer and juxtapose state-of-the-art developments with CAR NK cells as part of our Cancer Immunology series of Reviews.
The probiotic Lactococcus lactis has been used for the delivery of therapeutic molecules. Here the authors engineer Lactococcus lactis to express a fusion protein of Flt3L and OX40 ligand, eliciting anti-tumor immune response in preclinical cancer models.
Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are effective cancer drugs that have been approved for more than 20 specific indications. Nonetheless, acquired resistance and adverse events both limit the effectiveness of these agents. In this Review, the authors describe the development of novel ADC designs, including bispecific ADCs, probody–drug conjugates, immune-stimulating ADCs, protein-degrader ADCs and dual-drug ADCs. all of which have the potential to address these challenges and provide more effective ADCs.
Ideker and colleagues present NeST-VVN, a deep learning model based on cancer protein assembly data that can be used to predict the response and resistance of cancer cells to CDK4/6 inhibitors.
A deep residual learning framework identifies microsatellite instability in histology slides from patients with cancer and can be used to guide immunotherapy.
Theodorescu and colleagues describe a Molecular Twin approach that integrates multi-omic and computational pathology data from patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma using artificial intelligence to predict clinical outcomes.
Advances in technology have enabled the development of several novel antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) with encouraging clinical activity in patients with advanced-stage solid tumours. Indications for these therapies are expanding rapidly to earlier lines of therapy. Nonetheless, the toxicities of these various agents are not trivial and can be fatal, even in patients with early stage disease. In this Review, the authors summarize the toxicities of ADCs in patients with solid tumours both as monotherapies and in combination with other agents and discuss various ongoing research efforts attempting to optimize the therapeutic index of these agents.
Antibody–drug conjugates have emerged as a powerful tool to deliver highly targeted cancer therapies. Next-generation antibody-drug conjugate designs aim to push the envelope even further.