Tag Archives: translational

Gut microbiota influences blood-brain barrier permeability

The blood-brain barrier is a highly selective barrier that prevents unwanted molecules and cells from entering the brain from the bloodstream. In the current study, being published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the international interdisciplinary research team demonstrates that the transport of molecules across the blood-brain barrier can be modulated by gut microbes — which therefore play an important role in the protection of the brain. The investigators reached this conclusion by comparing the integrity and development of the blood-brain barrier between two groups of mice: the first group was raised in an environment where they were exposed to normal bacteria, and the second (called germ-free mice) was kept in a sterile environment without any bacteria. “We showed that the presence of the maternal gut microbiota during late pregnancy blocked the passage of labeled antibodies from the circulation into the brain parenchyma of the growing fetus,” says first author Dr…

Personalized cellular therapy achieves complete remission in 90 percent of acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients studied

The new data, which builds on preliminary findings presented at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting in December 2013, include results from the first 25 children and young adults (ages 5 to 22) treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and first five adults (ages 26 to 60) treated at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Twenty-seven of the 30 patients in the studies achieved a complete remission after receiving an infusion of these engineered “hunter” cells, and 78 percent of the patients were alive six months after treatment. “The patients who participated in these trials had relapsed as many as four times, including 60 percent whose cancers came back even after stem cell transplants. Their cancers were so aggressive they had no treatment options left,” said the study’s senior author, Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, a professor of Pediatrics in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia…

Genomic study identifies subgroups of breast cancer with varying sensitivities to treatment

The study led by Aleix Prat, Principal Investigator of VHIO´s Translational Genomics Group, in collaboration with José Baselga, Physician-in-Chief of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York (USA), has today been published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. The research centers on the fact that not all HER2+ tumors respond in the same way to anti-HER2 targeted therapy…

High levels of immune cells in breast tumors may help ID patients who benefit from trastuzumab

"We have previously shown that high levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes [immune cells in a tumor] are predictive of response to trastuzumab and chemotherapy administered after surgery for early-stage, HER2-positive breast cancer using samples from patients enrolled on the randomized, adjuvant phase III clinical trial called the FinHER study," said Sherene Loi, M.D., Ph.D., medical oncologist and head of the Translational Breast Cancer Genomics Lab at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia. "Our new data further support the positive relationship between tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and better outcomes with trastuzumab therapy, this time in a cohort of patients with newly diagnosed HER2-positive breast cancer who received the therapy before surgery. …