Cancer Care
M2Gen's CEO Wants to Take Personalized Cancer Treatment to the Masses
M2Gen's CEO Wants to Take Personalized Cancer Treatment to the Masses
Natural Born Killers
Nova Southeastern University, Davie
“Natural killer” cells are white-blood cells that play a role in rejecting tumors and cells infected by a virus. Scientists believe those killer cells can be trained to target specific tumor types. Using them would be less toxic than chemo and radiation and more selective. Researcher Richard Jove and the Nova Southeastern University Cell Therapy Institute, which he leads, work with Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet on pediatric sarcomas. An NSU team, led by Dr. H. Thomas Temple, saves the tissue, which is usually destroyed, to analyze and sequence the cells. NSU is creating a tumor library. — Mike Vogel
Purifying Stem Cells
Dr. Guenther Koehne / Miami Cancer Institute
Dr. Guenther Koehne left Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York to join Baptist Health South Florida’s Miami Cancer Institute as chief of bone marrow transplantation and hematologic oncology. The only Florida member of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Alliance, the institute gives patients access to many of the New York hospital’s clinical cancer treatment trials. Koehne’s primary directive is to develop a bone marrow transplantation program for treating cancers — in which doctors first destroy a cancer patient’s own bone marrow, then transplant stem cells from a donor to rebuild it.
The University of Miami also has a bone marrow transplantation program for treating cancer, but Miami Cancer Institute’s will use a different protocol, refined at Memorial Sloan Kettering. “We established a new approach to purify the stem cells from all the other cells,” he says. “You have what we call an enriched stem cell product.” That process reduces the side effects and eliminates the need for the recipient to take immunosuppressants. — Rochelle Broder-Singer
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