Matthew Halpert, PhD—immunologist and CEO of Immunocine—joins The Moss Report to discuss an important discovery: a new way to fully activate dendritic cells, the “coaches” of the immune system....
100 Trillion Reasons Your Gut Matters Why do some people respond to immune treatment for their cancers, while others get no effect? A lot of people are spending a lot of money on these “hot” new...
Immunotherapy: The Battle Within (The Film) The Moss Report has produced an hour-long documentary, “Immunotherapy: The Battle Within.” which is free to watch below. Creating this film has been a...
Ipilimumab: First in the Class of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors Close to 100,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with the dangerous skin disease melanoma each year, and about 7,600 die of the...
Evaluating Your Compatibility Score One of the most important questions is who will respond to the new type of immune treatment, immune checkpoint inhibition. A very important paper...
Assessing the Odds M.D. Anderson’s “Prognostic Scoring System” Shows The Importance Of A Vigorous Immune System One way of assessing one’s odds of survival is suggested by a very important (but...
Strength in NumbersA low lymphocyte count (lymphocytopenia) was seen in 28% of patients about to receive chemotherapy for colorectal cancer. Patients were randomized to receive interleukin-2...
For the past three years, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has declared cancer immunotherapy to be the "breakthrough of the year." An important part of this approach comes from a...
What is Immunotherapy? Immunotherapy is a kind of treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to attack cancer. There are many different kinds of immunotherapy. This includes: The insertion...
Transcript Immunotherapy is the so-called fourth modality in cancer treatment after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. And this is the most controversial or has been the most controversial of...
Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) of the Brain Scientists at Duke University have come up with an ingenious treatment for one of the deadliest of all cancers, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) of the...
The major excitement at ASCO 2013 was about "anti-PD1 therapy." PD-1 stands for "programmed death 1 receptor." Think of this as a kind of blockage in the immune system, which prevents the rest...
A Revolution in Cancer Therapy “Treatment of cancer has been revolutionized by immune checkpoint blockade therapies.” —Moshe Sade-Feldman, et al. Mass General Hospital, Boston “Cancer biologists...
Transcript Another huge topic in cancer is the state of the immune system. And I believe that this theory, the immune surveillance theory that was put forward by Mack Macfarlane in the 1950s is...
Steals the Show at ASCOThe major excitement at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) concerned “anti-PD1 therapy.” PD-1 stands for “programmed death 1...
Tracking Down the Tumor There is a common idea that cancer arises simply because of the weakness of the patient's immune system. Supposedly, our white blood cells patrol the highways and byways...
Immunodeficient people have an increased risk of cancer An exciting article in the British journal, Lancet, showed that immunodeficient people have an increased risk of cancer. This so-called...
The Most Exciting Development in Oncology Signatures of Mutational Processes In Human Cancer “There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate...
Wandering Cancer Cells If metastases are, at least, in part due to the activity of macrophages, then these cells already possess most or all of the key characteristics of wandering cancer cells....
NOTE: This is a rather technical article of which we were second author. We thought some readers would be interested in the debate over how exactly immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs work....
LETTER IN SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE My colleague, Tibor Bakacs, MD, PhD, DSc, of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and I have just had an e-letter published in the journal Science...
Are DC Vaccines Established Medicine?Dendritic cells were actually discovered in the 19th century, but the name “dendritic cells” (DCs) was not attached to them until 1973 (by Ralph M. Steinman...
How Does Cancer Get Started? Mainstream medicine believes that most cancer originates because of mysterious processes taking place in our genes. Environmental theories have fallen on hard...
Anti-PSA Vaccines Investigated CSF Vaccines Colony stimulating factors are hormone-like substances that accelerate the production of white blood cells. GM-CSF (granulocyte-macrophage...
Introduction of two new drugsThe year 2011 was noteworthy for the introduction of two new drugs to treat the dangerous form of skin malignancy, melanoma. In March, the FDA approved ipilumumab...
Using T CellsThe U.S. government at cancer.gov defines cellular adoptive immunotherapy as follows:“A type of immunotherapy in which T cells (a type of immune cell) are given to a patient to help...
A Healthy Immune System is Primed One thing that almost all cancers have in common is that they are related to the immune system. A healthy immune system is primed to attack ”non-self” as opposed...
Harnessing the Immune SystemThere is growing interest in the possibility of harnessing the immune system in the service of fighting cancer. In recent years, much attention was focused on the...
Directed Delivery There are a set of treatments that are neither surgical nor radiological, yet do a very efficient job of efficiently removing the tumor from the body. They are called “ablative...
Does this “Wonder Drug” still hold promise? Interleukin-2 (IL-2) is a substance formed naturally in the body by what are called activated T cells, a kind of white blood cell. In a semi-synthetic...
The Basis of the Immune SystemLymphocytes are one division of the white blood cells (WBCs) that form the basis of the immune system. There are three major kinds of lymphocytes: B cells, T...
Fundamental Methods of Immunotherapy Action Active specific immunotherapy (ASI) involves immunizing the patient with tumor cells and/or cell extracts, either alone or in combination with an...
Significant association between tumor mutational burden and immune-related adverse events during immune checkpoint inhibition therapies Authors: Csaba Kerepesi Tibor Bakacs Ralph W. Moss Shimon...
Concentrated BotanicalsA supplement to enhance the immune system is called “Protectival,” It is also called an “active immune shield.” Protectival is a patented formula of 14 highly concentrated...
Combining Therapies “There was a traditional notion that combining immunotherapy and chemotherapy may not be desirable due to the possible immunosuppressive nature of cytotoxic chemotherapy....