It is well known that overactive Ras signaling is linked to many forms of cancer, and despite intensive efforts worldwide to develop effective inhibitors of Ras, to date there is no anti-Ras inhibitor in clinical use.
High expression of CD47, a cell surface receptor on several types of cancer cells, has been identified as a ‘don’t eat me signal’ that inhibits their killing by macrophages or NK cells. Conversely, the CD47 antibody B6H12 that blocks SIRPα binding enhances macrophage-dependent clearance of tumors in several mouse models, although others have shown that such clearance can be independent of SIRPα signaling.
Many chemotherapeutic agents cause significant cytotoxicity to non-cancer ("normal") cells, resulting in undesirable side-effects and often limiting the dose and/or duration of chemotherapy that can be administered to a patient.
The National Cancer Institute's Cancer and Inflammation Program is seeking statements of capability or interest from parties interested in licensing this technology.
T cell receptors (TCRs) are proteins that recognize antigens in the context of infected or transformed cells and activate T cells to mediate an immune response and destroy abnormal cells. TCRs consist of two domains, one variable domain that recognizes the antigen and one constant region that helps the TCR anchor to the membrane and transmit recognition signals by interacting with other proteins. When a TCR is stimulated by an antigen, such as a tumor antigen, some signaling pathways activated in the cell lead to the production of cytokines, which mediate the immune response.
The Eunice Kennedy Schriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is seeking statements of capability or interest from parties interested in collaborative research to further develop, evaluate, or commercialize a new method for stabilizing molecular complexes in polyacrylamide gels.
Available for licensing from the Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is a novel gene signature of thirty-seven drug-responsive genes that links changes in gene expression to the clinically desirable outcome of improved overall survival. Expression of these genes has been linked to prognosis in several cancers, including, but not limited to: multiple myeloma, melanoma, and lung and breast cancers.
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in United States and it is estimated that there will be more than half a million deaths caused by cancer in 2009. A major drawback of the current chemotherapy-based therapeutics is the cytotoxic side-effects associated with them. Thus there is a dire need to develop new therapeutic strategies with fewer side-effects. Immunotherapy has taken a lead among the new therapeutic approaches. Enhancing the innate immune response of an individual has been a key approach for the treatment against different diseases such as cancer an
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Section on Molecular Neurobiology is seeking statements of capability or interest from parties interested in collaborative research to further evaluate or commercialize specific rabbit monoclonal antibodies generated against the ErbB4 receptor (also known as HER4) that have been validated for specificity using tissue sections and extracts from ErbB4 knockout mice.
The National Cancer Institute’s Protein Expression Laboratory seeks parties to co-develop dual luminescent/fluorescent cancer biomarkers.
In research settings, visualization of tumors or tumor cells is often done using either bioluminescence or fluorescence. However, both of these methods have shortcomings: bioluminescence is not sensitive enough to sort individual tumor cells, and fluorescence cannot be used effectively to view internal tumors and is best used with surface tumors.