Akeso Inc. has received approval from China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) for a phase Ib/II trial of ivonescimab (AK-112) combined with drebuxelimab (AK-119) for the treatment of advanced solid tumors.
Lyell Immunopharma Inc. has received FDA clearance for its IND application to initiate a phase I trial for LYL-845, an investigational tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy enhanced with Lyell's Epi-R technology for patients with relapsed and/or refractory metastatic or locally advanced melanoma and other select solid tumors.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, to Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and – for the second time – to Barry Sharpless of The Scripps Research Institute “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal
chemistry.”
Click chemistry, the Nobel Committee’s Olof Ramström told reporters while announcing the prize, “is almost like it sounds – it’s all about linking different molecules.”
He likened click chemistry to a seatbelt buckle, whose interlocking parts can be attached to many different materials, linking them by snapping the two parts of the buckle together.
“The problem was to find good chemical buckles,” Ramström said – chemicals that “will easily snap together, and importantly, they won’t snap with anything else.”
Tumor mutational burden (TMB), a biomarker used to assess whether a patient will respond to immunotherapy, needs to be recalculated in order to be useful for patients of Asian or African descent. Scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found a significant bias in the estimated TMB values affecting these populations and adjusted them for those patients.
Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF) expressing the LRRC15 protein (leucine-rich repeat-containing protein 15) could be responsible for the suppression of antitumor immunity, according to a study using mouse models of pancreatic cancer. Scientists from Roche Holding AG subsidiary Genentech Inc. demonstrated in vivo that TGF-β type 2 receptor signaling in healthy universal fibroblasts produces cancer-associated LRRC15+ myofibroblasts.
Verismo Therapeutics Inc. has received U.S. orphan drug designation from the FDA for Synkir-110 for the treatment of patients with mesothelin-expressing mesotheliomas.