Prospecting TCRs for immunotherapy

Prospecting for (Campaign) Gold

Campaigns and political parties are faced with the immensely important practical challenge of financing their efforts. Raising money is instrumental to all other aims. In recent years, this task has been complicated by the need to enlist ever greater numbers of contributors to raise ever larger sums of money. At the same time, fundraising burdens are eased a bit because contributors flock toget...

Immunotherapy for Breast Cancer Treatment

Breast cancer, as a heterogeneous disease, includes a wide range of pathological and clinical behaviors. Current treatment protocols, including radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and hormone replacement therapy, are mainly associated with poor response and high rate of recurrence. Therefore, more efforts are needed to develop alternative therapies for this type of cancer. Immunotherapy, as a novel str...

Prospecting for an HIV vaccine

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) sets several challenges for the development of a preventative HIV vaccine. Predictable, protective natural immunity against HIV does not occur and so unlike most other diseases for which vaccines exist, there are few guideposts from natural infection. Nonetheless, six vaccine efficacy trials have occurred. One in particular, the Thai trial called RV144, showed...

A novel system for cloning human TCRs

T-cell receptor (TCR)-based gene immunotherapy has emerged as a promising approach for the treatment of multiple malignancies. We have recently reported an efficient system for the cloning and functional evaluation of TCR-coding cDNAs. This system, which we named hTEC10, allows for the determination of TCR antigen specificity in less than 10 days, and may therefore constitute a fast and powerfu...

Prospecting for Precision: Promises for Personalized Medicine.