Patient Care Lung Cancer Prostate Cancer Melanoma Immunotherapy
To understand why Beau Gill built a mental cupboard for Jeff and Spike, first you must travel back with him to the small town of Catemaco in Mexico’s state of Veracruz.
Rachel Sauer | 
April 20, 2022
Immunotherapies have revolutionized the care of many cancers, teaching the body’s own immune cells to recognize and attack tumor cells. Leading the way are drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors, which block a kind of “white flag” that tumors wave as a peace signal to T cells that would very much like to kill them. Really, this white flag is a protein called PD-L1 – many tumors coat themselves in it. When PD-L1 on the surface of a cancer cell sees its partner, PD1, on T cells, these T cells are tricked into letting the cancer cell live. To counteract this dirty trick, checkpoint inhibitor drugs block the functions of PD-L1 on tumor cells (e.g. atezolizumab) or PD1 on T cells (e.g. pembrolizumab), allowing T cells to go about their cancer-killing business.
Cancer Center | June 24, 2019
Melanomas tend to be “hot” or “cold” – if they’re hot, immunotherapy lights melanoma tumors like beacons for elimination by the immune system; but 40-50 percent of melanomas are cold, making them invisible to the immune system, and patients with cold tumors tend to show little benefit from immunotherapies. The problem is that it’s been impossible to distinguish a hot melanoma from a cold one – the solution has been to administer immunotherapy and hope for the best, often leading to wasted time and resources. Now a University of Colorado Cancer Center study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 identifies a possible way to predict which melanomas are hot and cold: Tumors with mutations in genes leading to over-activation of the NF-kB signaling pathway were more than three times as likely to respond to anti-PD1 immunotherapy compared with tumors in which these changes were absent.
Cancer Center | April 02, 2019
Dermatology Times
May 23, 2022
Run by the Colorado Melanoma Foundation, the Sun Bus has provided more than 3,500 free skin cancer screenings throughout the central and southwestern United States. Along the way, providers are learning about melanoma misconceptions.
Forbes
May 13, 2022
The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has announced that it will make a $200 million investment over the next five years to create the Gates Institute, a research and treatment center that will focus on the development of new regenerative, cellular, and gene therapies for a variety of serious illnesses.
Mirage News
May 10, 2022
In initial research recently published in the journal Molecular Cancer Research, Cecilia Caino, PhD, and her co-investigators discovered that tumor cells use mitochondria to control their growth and detect stress that can destroy a tumor cell if it is not controlled.
Science News for Students
May 09, 2022
Lung cancer cells seem to smell yummy to one species of little worm. Now, scientists are using that allure to build a squirmy new tool to detect cancer.
