News

A team from the Frederick National Laboratory’s Biopharmaceutical Development Program is developing a new autologous cell therapy line that uses engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to treat acute myeloid leukemia, a particularly aggressive form of pediatric blood cancer. This foray into cell immunotherapy represents a new avenue of research and development for the BDP, which has traditionally focused on biologics to fight cancer, HIV, and rare diseases. 

Jason Evans is giving me a tour of the new NCI Program for Natural Products Discovery (NPNPD) facility when he pauses to look at a sample-handling robot under repair, its mechanical insides temporarily disemboweled. I ask if he has an electrical engineering background, and he laughs. Evans is a scientific programmer, but for him and his colleagues, that’s beside the point.

Discoveries by AIDS researcher Brandon F. Keele, Ph.D. have not only put him on the leading edge of research to prevent and treat HIV infection. He’s also influenced the work of his peers.

Keele, a principal investigator and senior principal scientist in the AIDS and Cancer Virus Program at the Frederick National Laboratory was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science, a global citation database. Keele and colleague Jeffrey Lifson, M.D. were recognized for producing papers that ranked in the top 1 percent by citations for their field.

A team led by Frank McCormick, Ph.D., FRS, D.Sc. (Hon), RAS National Program Advisor at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and professor emeritus at UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, has found a new vulnerability in pancreatic cancer and revealed a potential strategy for combating one of the most treatment-resistant malignancies.

It started as an ambitious shot in the dark, a plunge into the scientific unknown. But the National Cancer Institute RAS Initiative has quickly helped to reverse the field’s perspective on a problem long considered unsolvable.

While advancing age is the most important risk factor for cancer, the incidence of the disease decreases in very elderly people.

Dr. Ian Crozier Draws on His Own Experience to Inform Studies in Humans and in the Lab

Surviving very severe Ebola virus disease made it clear to Ian Crozier, M.D., that there was a gap to bridge between clinicians caring for patients at outbreak bedsides and the bench scientists peering into fundamental mechanisms of disease to develop prevention and treatment strategies.

A multidisciplinary team including members of the Frederick National Laboratory has been recognized with the “Best Paper” award at SC19, a prestigious international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. Of the 344 papers submitted to SC19, only 87 were accepted, and just one was named Best Paper.

FREDERICK, Md. -- “Sure, it’s easier than doing research in more isolated places, say Antarctica, or outer space—but that does not make it easy for those on the ground. Sometimes densely populated areas pose problems of their own. Not everyone agrees on the need, the presence of so many ‘outsiders,’ or on the approach taken. People were attacked. Research sites were burned.”

FREDERICK, Md. -- High levels of the enzyme tyrosine threonine kinase (TTK) in many types of cancer cells, including lung cancer, contribute to uncontrolled cell growth. A study published by Frederick National Laboratory Director Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D. and his laboratory team demonstrated that a promising anti-TTK treatment that acts against many of those types of cancer cells also results in lung cancer cell death.