
1 Patient, 7 Tumors and 100B Cells Equal 1 Striking Recovery - smb06
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/health/cancer-immunotherapy.html
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ihodes
Took a few notes when reading the paper[1], expanded some acronyms as well.
Definitely a nice result, and an interesting paper.

* Steve Rosenberg's a respected expert in the field

* Adoptive T cell therapy (ACT) of TIL (tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes) T cells specific for a (common) KRAS mutation (G12D)

* Culture/expand TILs, use tandem-minigenes to narrow down most reactive (to in silico ID mutations) TILs, then use synthetic peptides on the mutations encoded in the TMG that elicits largest response to find which epitopes in particular were being reacted to.

* 6 tumors eradicated, 7th shrunk but recurred (had to be resected, patient has no disease 4 months later); 7th had lost the HLA-C allele that the TCRs were specific to

* The supplementary materials/methods were pretty interesting (very technical)

[1] T-Cell Transfer Therapy Targeting Mutant KRAS in Cancer
[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1609279](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1609279)

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beautifulfreak
Lately I've been wondering about phages and gut bacteria. Are there phages in
the wild that affect gut bacteria, and reduce the preponderance of one species
or another? What if a diet pill containing phages could knock out undesirable
strains of bacteria and promote weight loss? Or elevate mood? If there are
such phages in the wild, is it possible that they stay with a host forever,
infecting the host's gut bacteria perpetually, perhaps to ill consequence? I
just wonder if anyone's looking into that.

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danieltillett
In a former life I used to work on phages and yes there are phages that attack
gut bacteria and yes they can be used to reduce one species over another.

The problem is that many phages are quite narrow in specificity and will only
attack single specific strains of individual bacterial species. To do what you
want to do you need a very large number of different phages.

There is a solution to this problem which is to isolate broad host range
phages. My lab was quite successful in finding these phages. I do miss working
in this area :(

