Ludwig Lausanne’s George Coukos was named the Personality in Science by Finanz und Wirtschaft, a leading Swiss business paper that selects four people each year as the “Personalities of the Year.” This article is in German (PDF).
A Cell study led by Ludwig Stanford’s Michelle Monje examines the cellular mechanisms behind “chemo brain,” the cognitive impairment from chemotherapy that lingers after the cancer is gone, and identifies a potential remedy.
Ludwig Lausanne’s Lana Kandalaft discusses emerging dendritic cell targets, treatment cost and the future of cancer immunotherapy.
Phil Greenberg, a Ludwig SAC member and recipient of the 2018 Richard V. Smalley, M.D., Memorial Award and Lecture, answers five questions about the present and future of cancer immunotherapy.
Researchers led by Ludwig Stanford’s Howard Chang and Stanford geneticist William Greenleaf mapped DNA sequences that regulate the expression of specific genes in malignancies.
Ludwig MIT’s Angelika Amon is one of five scientists to receive a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, given for transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life. Amon was honored for her work on determining the consequences of aneuploidy, an abnormal chromosome number that results from mis-segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
Ludwig Stanford’s Sam Gambhir leads a large study to better understand the transition from normal health to disease as part of Project Baseline, a joint effort between Stanford, Duke and Verily, that could result in the identification of new markers in the blood, stool or urine that help predict cancer and other diseases.
Home to the new translational research center on cancer, the Agora building in Lausanne will bring together nearly 300 researchers and clinicians to create new therapies for patients. Initiated in 2013 by the ISREC Foundation, this project stems from a partnership between the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the CHUV, the HUG, the University of Lausanne, the University of Geneva and EPFL. This article is in French.
Ludwig Johns Hopkins Co-director Bert Vogelstein shares a video analysis of the results, published in Science, of a study on whether mutations that drive malignant growth are the same or vary between primary tumors and their metastases.
Two new pancreatic cancer research laboratories opening at MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are giving researchers and patients renewed hope in fighting a disease that claims thousands of lives each year. The lab led by Ludwig MIT’s Tyler Jacks will focus on how doctors can use the immune system to control pancreatic cancer.
In this contributed piece, Ludwig MSK’s Jedd Wolchok, Roberta Zappasodi and Taha Merghoub describe their recent Cancer Cell study, in which they identified a new subset of immunosuppressive T cells.
Ludwig MSK’s Luis Felipe Campesato argues in this essay that though recent breakthroughs have made immunotherapy one of the pillars of cancer care, much progress is needed to expand its use across patients and cancer types.
This article features Chi Van Dang, scientific director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, who is an advocate for chronotherapy. This approach involves timing the delivery of drugs with the body’s circadian clock, striking either when cancer cells are most vulnerable to assault and/or when healthy cells are least sensitive to toxicity.
“The Microenvironmental Landscape of Brain Tumors,” a review written by Ludwig Lausanne’s Johanna Joyce and her colleague Daniela Quail, was selected to be part of Cancer Cell’s ‘Best of 2017’ issue.
A magnetic wire used to snag scarce and hard-to-capture tumor cells could prove to be a swift and effective tactic for early cancer detection, according to a Nature Biomedical Engineering study led by Ludwig Stanford’s Sam Gambhir. In pigs, the technique attracts 10-80 times more tumor cells than current blood-based cancer-detection methods.
General physicians and many oncologists think of metastatic cancer as being “widely disseminated and incurable” in most cases involving solid tumors in adults, said Ludwig Chicago Co-director Ralph Weichselbaum in a lecture he gave as the ASCO 2018 David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award winner. But he notes that dissemination is limited for some metastatic cancers, and such cancers may be curable with local therapy.
Doctors have hypothesized that pancreatic tumors release a chemical signal or factor that travels throughout the body promoting the breakdown of muscle and fat. However, a new Nature study led by Matthew Vander Heiden of Ludwig MIT suggests otherwise.
When patients with adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma were treated with nivolumab (Opdivo), a checkpoint inhibitor, their disease quickly became much worse, doctors reported in a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. “This is a time of very rapid learning,” said Ludwig MSK’s Jedd Wolchok, who was not involved in the study. He believes that patients with any type of T-cell lymphoma should be carefully monitored if given a checkpoint inhibitor.
Scientists have reported a new approach that eliminated all evidence of advanced-stage breast cancer after a single infusion of the patient’s own immune cells. Ludwig Stanford’s Crystal Mackall, who was not involved in the study, called it “elegant in its simplicity” but noted that the approach will only be a viable option if scientists can uncover faster, simpler and cheaper ways to find, isolate and multiply the tiny subset of immune cells that are still in the fight.
A Ludwig Cancer Research study, published in the journal Cell, has uncovered an entirely novel mechanism by which cells enter a state of dormancy as tissues starved of oxygen become increasingly acidic. The study, led by Chi Van Dang, scientific director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has potentially significant implications for cancer therapy
Genetic research advances are beginning to make personalized treatments a reality. Ludwig Lausanne’s George Coukos comments that this is “an extraordinary moment in human history” when the word “cure” can be seriously used in relation to cancer, our most feared global killer. However, uncertainties and frustrations must be overcome if the vision of defeating cancer is to become a reality for all.
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the most-referenced paper across English Wikipedia is a 2002 collection of more than 15,000 sequences of human and mouse genes by Robert Strausberg, now deputy scientific director at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.
Ralph Weichselbaum, who is today director of the Ludwig Center at Chicago, and Ludwig Board member Samuel Hellman suggested somewhat controversially in 1995 that metastatic cancer could occupy an intermediate state between curable, localized tumors and lethal, systemic disease. Twenty-three years later, Weichselbaum, Hellman and colleagues have confirmed their “oligometastasis” hypothesis with a molecular analysis of tumors from patients treated for colorectal cancer.
During the society’s annual meeting scheduled for June 1-5 in Chicago, ASCO will present awards to several leaders of cancer care including Ludwig Chicago’s Ralph R. Weichselbaum, who received the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award and Lecture, which recognizes an oncologist who has made outstanding contribution to cancer research, diagnosis, or treatment.
Immunotherapy remains one of the biggest hopes for finding a breast cancer cure. Among other topics, Ludwig MSK’s Jedd Wolchok discusses lessons researchers can take from successful cases—melanoma, lung or other cancers—that can be applied to breast cancer on Investigating Breast Cancer, the official podcast of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
As Ludwig MIT’s director Bob Weinberg once said: “If you live long enough, you will get cancer.” But why is cancer the beast that stalks us all? What is it about this disease that makes it inevitable? And why is it the price we must pay for many incredible evolutionary advances? To understand this issue, we need to go way back in our evolutionary history.
The Medicine Maker Power List recognizes the top 100 inspirational industry professionals in four categories: Masters of the Bench, Industry Influencers, Business Captains, and Champions of Change. Ludwig’s Scientific Director Chi Van Dang was included as #10 in the “Masters of the Bench” category for his contributions to the understanding of the Myc oncogene.
Ludwig Lausanne’s Lana Kandalaft, George Coukos and Alexandre Harari study shows that an entirely new type of personalized cancer vaccine induces novel, potent and clinically effective immune responses in patients receiving a combination of standard therapies for recurrent, stage III and IV ovarian cancer.
A study published in Science Translational Medicine led by Ludwig MIT’s Robert Weinberg found that surgery in breast cancer patients may trigger a systemic immunosuppressive response, allowing the outgrowth of dormant cancer cells at distant sites whose ability to generate tumors had previously been kept in check by the immune system.
A Ludwig Johns Hopkins study published in Science Translational Medicine reports the analysis of an experimental, minimally invasive DNA test for the detection of ovarian and endometrial cancers, both of which are difficult to detect in their early stages, when they are most curable.
In a study published in Science Translational Medicine, Ludwig Harvard investigator Rakesh Jain and his colleague Dai Fukumura at Massachusetts General Hospital found that obesity, known to reduce survival in several types of cancer, may also explain the ineffectiveness of angiogenesis inhibitors, which block the formation of blood vessels that feed tumors.
A Ludwig Cancer Research study, led by Ludwig Lausanne investigator Alexandre Harari and Ludwig Lausanne Director George Coukos, shows that ovarian cancer, which has proved resistant to currently available immunotherapies, could be susceptible to personalized immunotherapy.
In a Science study, Ludwig Johns Hopkins researchers show that their experimental liquid biopsy test found about 70 percent of eight common types of cancer in patients already known to have the disease.
Ludwig’s Scientific Director Chi Van Dang, the new Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Research, discusses the evolution of cancer research, advances in areas like the tumor microenvironment, and challenges raised by the complexity of cancer.