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America's NIH Scientists Have a Cancer Breakthrough. Layoffs are Delaying It.


Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post. But the results were published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday — "the same day the agency was ...

Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post.But the results were published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday — "the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs..." The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results "remarkable" because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person's own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers. While Rosenberg is already working "to refine and improve upon the results," he told the Post that two scientists involved in the specialized process of preparing the cells to treat patients were fired in the probationary purge.

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