News Releases

Inflammation in the blood could serve as a new biomarker to help identify patients with advanced pancreatic cancer who won’t respond to the immune-stimulating drugs known as CD40 agonists, suggests a new study from researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania published in JCI Insight.

Patients with inactive cancer and not currently undergoing treatments also face a significantly higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19, a new study from Penn Medicine published online today in JNCI Cancer Spectrum shows.

Several genetic mutations previously linked to breast cancer and included on commercial genetic tests, including direct-to-consumer tests, were found not to increase a woman’s risk of disease, according to a population study of more than 64,000 women published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine from several institutions, including Penn Medicine.

PARP inhibitors are recently developed drugs that have shown great promise against some types of ovarian, breast, prostate and pancreatic cancer, but many patients’ tumors develop resistance to the drugs. Now researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have reported a strategy for defeating such resistance and boosting the effectiveness of these drugs.

A DNA mutation that occurs frequently in the development of many pancreatic tumors appears to make these cancers vulnerable to an existing type of drug known as PARP inhibitors, according to a new study from scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Knocking out a protein known to stifle T cell activation on CAR T cells using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology enhanced the engineered T cells’ ability to eliminate blood cancers, according to new preclinical data from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center.

A new biomarker discovered by a team that includes researchers from Penn Medicine identifies patients with an aggressive form of lymphoma unlikely to respond to the targeted treatment ibrutinib.

Of 22 patients treated with the injection dose of teclistamab, who were also chosen for the phase II study, 74 percent experienced a partial response or better.