New on NCI’s Websites for January 2020

January 2, 2020, by NCI Staff

Available cancer prevention interventions include medications, lifestyle choices, treatments for infections, screening tests, protective vaccines, and surgery.

NCI’s collection of cancer information products is constantly growing, so we provide periodic updates on new and updated content of interest to the cancer community.

New Blog: Cancer Prevention Science

NCI’s Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) recently debuted its new blog. Cancer Prevention Science highlights recent research findings, features interviews with leaders in the fields of cancer prevention and supportive care, and introduces new projects and programs supported by DCP.

Immunotherapy Drug Improves Outcomes for Some Children with Relapsed Leukemia

New findings from an NCI-sponsored clinical trial show that treatment with the immunotherapy drug blinatumomab is superior to standard chemotherapy for children and young adults with high- or intermediate-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) that has relapsed.

Expanded Information about Immunotherapy

NCI has made a number of updates to its information about immunotherapy treatment for people with cancer. The section now includes pages about different types of immunotherapy and side effects these treatments may cause.

New Issue of DCTD Pipeline News Posted

The November 2019 issue of Pipeline News, a quarterly newsletter from the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD), includes a profile of Bhadrasain Vikram, M.D., chief of the Radiation Research Program's Clinical Radiation Oncology Branch; a spotlight on results of a clinical trial of the drug selumetinib; updates from the NCI Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program; and news about other DCTD programs and activities.

NCI to Support Cell Therapy Production for Multicenter Clinical Trials

DCTD has announced it will soon support the production of cell-based immunotherapies at NCI, allowing NCI to make cell therapy products, such as CAR T cells, available to intramural and extramural clinical trial investigators.

New Issue of OCG e-Newsletter Published

The Office of Cancer Genomics (OCG) has published issue 23 of the OCG e-Newsletter. Topics include: crowd-sourcing DREAM challenges, in collaboration with the Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD2) Network, to develop predictive algorithms to identify effective cancer treatments; databases and other resources available for community use; a perspective on cancer genomics research; and clinical molecular data of Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI) next-generation cancer models that can be accessed through NCI’s Genomic Data Commons (GDC).

New Websites for CCR Multidisciplinary Clinics

NCI’s Center for Cancer Research (CCR) has launched new websites for its Prostate Cancer Multidisciplinary Clinic and Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma Clinic. The prostate cancer clinic provides comprehensive consultations on diagnosis and treatment options to prostate cancer patients. The thyroid clinic includes a multidisciplinary team that reviews cases of individuals affected by medullary thyroid carcinoma for treatment and management of their disease.

Video Describes Trial for Patients with Gastrointestinal Tumors

Jonathan Hernandez, M.D., a clinical investigator in CCR’s Surgical Oncology Program, and his research team are dedicated to improving cancer treatment by developing novel human tissue models. In a new video, Dr. Hernandez describes his team’s latest clinical trial for patients with operable gastrointestinal tumors.

New Video: Discovering New Far-Red Fluorescent Probes

CCR has created a new video to help explain the discovery of a novel class of molecules used by biologists to illuminate the inner workings of cancer cells: far-red fluorescent probes. Researchers in the lab of Martin Schnermann, Ph.D., used synthetic chemistry to synthesize the probes, which may make it possible to image live tissue in greater depth and detail than is possible with current techniques.