Lake Union life science building lands its first tenant. Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. has landed the first tenant at its four-story life science office building in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood and two other leases are pending, according to Newmark Knight Frank real estate broker Jesse Ottele. More prospective tenants are interested in the 205,000-square-foot waterfront building, which will feature a four-story atrium facing Lake Union when…
The emerging form of cancer treatment called CAR T immunotherapy is wiping out the disease in some terminal patients — but despite early successes, the treatments still have major drawbacks. Many patients who take CAR T treatment also battle dangerous side effects, which can be deadly. For some patients, the treatments simply don’t work at all. But a new understanding of how…
Humans’ ability to notice moving objects has always been a useful skill, from avoiding an animal predator in ancient times to crossing a busy street in the modern world. That evolutionary success attests to the importance of visual motion processing, and why there may be specialized regions of the brain specifically dedicated to this function,researchers say. To shed light on…
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center immunobioengineer Dr. Matthias Stephan has received a 2018 Investigator’s Award in Cell and Gene Therapy for Cancer from the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy to support the development of a combined T-cell programming, cancer-vaccine strategy to treat cancer. His proposed method, which unites nanoparticles that carry cancer vaccine–specific T-cell receptor genes with a vaccine designed to trigger an immune…
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received a $1.26 million, five-year Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, or NIGMS. The award will fund a new science education and training program called “Frontiers in Cancer Research,” which will focus on: inspiring secondary school students from underrepresented communities to pursue biomedical and clinical research careers; developing and…
Type 1 diabetes (or T1D) is caused by a selective destruction of the body’s insulin-producing cells resulting from chronic inflammation of the pancreatic islet cells. The goal of this project is to discover, prior to patients exhibiting symptoms, the initial changes that take place in human islets, which are believed to cause insulin-producing cell loss at the onset of diabetes. These findings will…
Seattle Children’s is launching BrainChild with the goal of finding better treatments, or even cures, for children with brain cancer. BrainChild is a series of clinical trials that will treat children whose cancer relapsed using CAR T cells, the promising immunotherapy technology that has already led to revolutionary treatments for blood cancers. The treatments could spell hope for the hundreds…
Dr. Charles Murry is the Woods Professor of Pathology, Bioengineering and Medicine/Cardiology at the University of Washington. He also serves as Director of the UW’s Heart Regeneration Program, with the goal of achieving stem cell-based heart regeneration in patients. Dr. Charles Murry has recently published a paper that used stem cell derived heart cells to treat heart damage in monkeys. It’s…
A clinical trial conducted in six medical centers in the United States has suggested that an operation, laparoscopic fundoplication, to treat abnormal acid gastroesophageal reflux in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF, a fatal lung disease, may slow its progression. A paper on the clinical trial was published Aug. 9 in the medical journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Dr. Ganesh Raghu, a UW…
“Imagine a world where diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is as simple as getting your blood tested during your annual physical,” writes philanthropist Bill Gates. He’s started a venture to fund development of novel biomarkers, which are measurable signs in the brain and body of the presence of disease proteins: amyloid, tau, and α-synuclein, among others. His dream is one shared by all Alzheimer’s…