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This year, gene therapy finally became a clinical reality. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two personalized treatments that engineer a patient’s own immune system to hunt down and kill cancer cells. The treatments, the first gene therapies ever approved by the FDA, work in people with certain blood cancers, even patients whose cancers haven’t responded to other treatments...

Some bacteria may shield tumor cells against a common chemotherapy drug.

Certain types of bacteria make an enzyme that inactivates the drug gemcitabine, researchers report in the Sept. 15 Science. Gemcitabine is used to treat patients with pancreatic, lung, breast and bladder cancers.

Bacteria that produce the enzyme cytidine deaminase converted the drug to an inactive form. That...

On August 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a novel gene therapy for patients with a rare type of leukemia. This is the first time the agency has greenlighted a gene therapy approach for use in the United States.

The treatment, called CAR-T immunotherapy, uses genetically engineered T cells, immune system fighters usually tasked with identifying invaders in the body,...

A method that gives mice a tan without using ultraviolet radiation now works in human skin samples. It’s an early step in developing a lotion or cream that might provide fair-skinned folk with protection against skin cancer.

As reported June 13 in Cell Reports, a topical drug penetrated and tanned laboratory samples of live human skin, absent the sun. Unlike self-tanning lotions that...