Pathology News

Cancer Discovery

Researchers in the Nguyen Lab at Yale School of Medicine focus on understanding how lung cancer metastasizes to distant organs, including the brain, and how cancer cells that reach the brain become resistant to drug therapy.

There could be new hope on for kidney cancer patients. Researchers announced early results of an anti-tumor vaccine for patients with stage 3 or 4 kidney cancer, who face high recurrence risk.

Advances made in Yale labs and developed into successful treatments are the result of cross-disciplinary collaborations across schools at Yale.

A compassionate dermatologist with expertise in genetics, Keith Choate, MD, PhD, Aaron B. and Marguerite Lerner Professor and Chair of Dermatology and professor of genetics and pathology goes beneath the skin's surface to target dermatologic conditions at their root cause.

The "personalized cancer vaccines" (PCVs) used by the nine patients in the trial were targeted to genes specific to their tumors, explained a team led by Dr. David Braun of the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Conn.

“This approach is truly distinct from vaccine attempts in kidney cancer," said David A. Braun, MD, PhD first author of the paper in a press release. “We pick targets that are unique to the cancer and different from any normal part of the body, so the immune system can be effectively “steered” towards the cancer in a very specific way. We learned which specific targets in the cancer are most susceptible to immune attack and demonstrated that this approach can generate long-lasting immune responses, directing the immune system to recognize cancer,” added Braun.

Vaccines generated using the cells left over after tumour removal surgery could help to keep patients from redeveloping cancer.

Vaccines are on the cutting edge of cancer therapy research as a possible treatment option for the future. The trial led by Yale Cancer Center (YCC) principal investigator and first author David Braun, MD, PhD, explored the effectiveness of the personalized cancer vaccine specifically for patients with advanced kidney cancer — stage III or IV clear cell renal cell carcinoma.