News Releases

Too many “exhausted” T cells left in the wake of aggressive chemotherapy regimens for patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) make it more challenging for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy to do its job. Now, a new study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows how to overcome this type of resistance and reinvigorate these T cells with an experimental small molecule inhibitor.

A meta-analysis of nearly 200,000 men revealed 22 new genetic locations that could be susceptible to inherited testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT) — a 40 percent increase in the number of regions known to be associated with the cancer.

A new technology for cellular immunotherapy developed by Abramson Cancer Center researchers at Penn Medicine showed promising anti-tumor activity in the lab against hard-to-treat cancers driven by the once-considered “undruggable” KRAS mutation, including lung, colorectal, and pancreatic.

Each year, the Basser Global Prize recognizes a leading scientist who has conceptually advanced BRCA1/2-related research. Individuals with mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are at an increased risk of breast, ovarian, pancreatic and other cancers.

Antibodies aren’t the only immune cells needed to fight off COVID-19 — T cells are equally important and can step up to do the job when antibodies are depleted, suggests a new Penn Medicine study of blood cancer patients with COVID-19 published in Nature Medicine.

More than two-thirds of pancreatic cancer patients harboring genetic mutations saw their tumor stop growing or shrink substantially after being switched from intensive chemotherapy to the PARP inhibitor rucaparib as a maintenance therapy, researchers from the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania reported online today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.