Orca Bio, a late-stage biotechnology company, on March 17 announced results from the pivotal phase III Precision-T study of Orca-T, its lead investigational allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy, in patients with acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, high-risk myelodysplastic syndrome and mixed-phenotype acute leukemia. Orca-T is manufactured using highly purified regulatory T-cells, hematopoietic stem cells and conventional T-cells derived from peripheral blood from either related or unrelated matched donors.
FDA granted traditional approval to Merck’s pembrolizumab (Keytruda) with trastuzumab, fluoropyrimidine- and platinum-containing chemotherapy for the first-line treatment of adults with locally advanced unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma whose tumors express PD-L1 (CPS ≥1).
Researchers from the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center demonstrated the potential of a novel treatment approach including immunotherapy to treat advanced human papillomavirus-negative head-and-neck squamous cell carcinoma. More than half of study participants had 50% or more of their tumors shrink after receiving the immunotherapy drug nivolumab with chemotherapy, followed by response-adaptive chemo-radiation therapy.
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers developed a “self-driving” microscope that solves two challenges that have long plagued microscopy: 1) imaging living cells or organisms at dramatically different scales, and 2) following a specific structure or area of interest over long periods of time.