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Last month new “bivalent” booster vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer became available that protect against currently circulating Omicron variants as well as earlier strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. This Q&A features Joel Ernst, MD, a UCSF professor of medicine whose research aims to understand how pathogens evade the immune system.
On a sunny Friday, teams of aspiring young scientists gathered in the Clinical Sciences building at Parnassus Heights to look for treasure in a trillion data points about cancer.
A new therapy pulls forward a mutated version of the KRAS protein to help the immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells.
UCSF-led research outlines the comprehensive immune landscape and microbiome of pancreatic cysts as they progress from benign cysts to pancreatic cancer. Their findings could reveal the mechanism of neoplastic progression and provide targets for immunotherapy to inhibit progression or treat invasive disease.
A new variation of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system makes it easier to re-engineer massive quantities of cells for therapeutic applications. The approach, developed at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF), lets scientists introduce especially long DNA sequences to precise locations in the genomes of cells at remarkably high efficiencies without the viral delivery systems that have traditionally been used to carry DNA into cells.
T cells used in immunotherapy treatments can get exhausted and shut down by fighting cancer cells and tumors. Using a CRISPR-based edit on these cells’ genomes, researchers at UCSF and Gladstone Institutes have rendered the therapeutic cells more resilient against tumors.
