"Immune"

The collaboration aims to improve the efficiency of the drug discovery pipeline by leveraging industry-leading capabilities to identify genetic variants that cause human disease.

In the last decade, the introduction of several immune checkpoint inhibitors such as CTLA-4/PD-1/PD-L1 and other immune drugs such as Keytruda and Opdivo have marked a major advance in cancer treatment by "liberating" immune T cells and giving them back their ability to attack cancer cells. However, previous data shows that only 10-30% of patients have a good outcome with these immunotherapies

CAR-T therapy is a cellular immunotherapy treatment that has become very popular in recent years. This therapy uses genetic engineering techniques to upgrade the patient's immune T cells in vitro, before entering the body to exert a powerful anti-cancer effect. Currently, CAR-T therapy has performed very well in blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukaemia.

A three-drug combination regimen significantly prolongs survival in patients with HPV-positive cancers, new data from a clinical trial shows. For patients who had not been treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, it resulted in significant tumour shrinkage in 88% of patients, and even in patients who failed immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment, 63% had significant tumour shrinkage.

A cutting-edge study from the University of California, San Francisco, recently showed that researchers have been able to make immune cells, which already recognize cancer cells, more powerful and durable through CRISPR gene editing tools, promising to become tireless, cold-blooded "cancer killers"!