Cancer Research

The Biopharmaceutical Development Program (BDP) at Frederick National Laboratory is engineering cells into cancer-killers that are being used to treat children and young adults participating in early-phase pediatric cancer trials. The treatment is called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy. CAR T cells are a type of white blood cell…

Common drugs for controlling pain and inflammation – such as aspirin and ibuprofen – improved overall lung cancer survival by a statistically significant margin in a long-term study of patient medical records. This finding called for more definitive randomized clinical trials. Use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) was…

Five new projects led by Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNL) scientists have earned Laboratory Directed Exploratory Research (LDER) funding for the upcoming fiscal year. The LDER program, which was modeled after the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, provides FNL scientists…

Some of the world’s top scientific leaders in the field will highlight the current progress of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in cancer research and clinical care at a scientific symposium hosted by Hood College in partnership with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, September 2022. Cancer researchers are…

On any given day, microscopist Susan Lea, D.Phil., and her team at NCI at Frederick collect more data than can fit on any standard hard drive, creating a challenge for data storage and analysis. Their average data collection is 5 terabytes, a quantity roughly 20 times the storage capacity of a 256-gigabyte laptop or the equivalent of storing…

Investigators from the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research will share their latest work regarding the use of pre-clinical models for compound screening and tumor characterization, bioinformatics and technology initiatives, among other topics, at the American Association for Cancer Research 2022 Annual Meeting. More than 30…

The classical RAS family of proteins functions as molecular switches at the cell’s plasma membrane where it cycles between an active and inactive state. The active state initiates a cascade of events that promote downstream signaling to regulate cellular functions, such as cell proliferation. Mutations and dysregulation of the RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK…

The Frederick National Laboratory will host a new training program in Frederick, Maryland, September 12-16 for cancer researchers who want to build expertise in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Cryo-EM is a microscopy technique where samples are flash-frozen and bombarded with electrons to generate images. The resulting high-resolution…

Scientists have identified a genetic variant that can predict whether immunotherapy drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, used to treat cancer, might fail in certain patients. The team’s findings, which appear in Lancet Oncology, point to HLA-A*03, an allele (a form of a gene) found on chromosome 6 of human DNA. The presence of HLA-A*03 in…

Frederick National Laboratory (FNL) scientists, led by Stephan Stern, Ph.D., and their colleagues have created a novel imaging agent that, with further development, might detect deadly pancreatic cancer at its earliest, most-treatable stages and thereby improve the prognosis for patients. Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate because it…