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…
The SET1/MLL family of histone methyltransferases is conserved in eukaryotes and regulates transcription by catalyzing histone H3K4 mono-, di-, and tri-methylation. These enzymes form a common five-subunit catalytic core whose assembly is critical for their basal and regulated enzymatic activities through unknown mechanisms. Here, we present the crystal structure of the intact yeast COMPASS histone methyltransferase catalytic module consisting of Swd1, Swd3,…
For years now, experts have hammered this message home to students: If you want your pricey college degree to pay off, you should major in a STEM field— science, technology, engineering or math. A fresh release of higher-education data for Washington state shows just how well students have listened. The information from Washington’s Education Research & Data Centerreleased this month shows that the…
In 1987, at the age of 40, world-renowned Spanish tenor José Carreras was diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia and given long odds of survival. He underwent a bone marrow transplant at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that would cure his disease. A year later, in gratitude, he established a Barcelona-based foundation to support and promote the kind of research that…
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…
The influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) fusion glycoprotein mediates viral entry into host cells through its receptor binding and membrane fusion activities. In this issue of Cell, Das et al. use single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (smFRET) to monitor HA conformational dynamics. Their study reveals this prototypical class I fusion protein to be a highly dynamic molecule capable of reversibly sampling multiple…
CD8+ T cells respond to signals via the T cell receptor (TCR), costimulatory molecules, and immunoregulatory cytokines by developing into diverse populations of effector and memory cells. The relative strength of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling early in the T cell response can dramatically influence downstream effector and memory T cell differentiation. We show that initial PI3K signaling during T cell activation…
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…
