Timothy Fan

A phase I clinical trial of PAC-1, a drug that spurs programmed cell death in cancer cells, found only minor side effects in patients with end-stage cancers. The drug stalled the growth of tumors in the five people in the trial with neuroendocrine cancers and reduced tumor size in two of those patients. It also showed some therapeutic activity against sarcomas, scientists and clinicians report in the British Journal of Cancer.

Dr. Timothy Fan (ACPP), veterinary oncologist and professor at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine and a Program Leader for the Cancer Center at Illinois, is leading two clinical trials using similar immunotherapies to treat dogs with malignant melanoma. The novel approaches, developed in partnership with cancer researchers based in Boston, have yielded encouraging results in canine patients, and human trials using the same therapeutic platforms are expected to begin in 2023.

Cancers that begin in the brain, or start elsewhere in the body and spread to it, are notoriously difficult to treat. Illinois researchers in the Cancer Center at Illinois labs are looking to improve those odds by developing better therapeutics.

In the fall of 2020, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign welcomed students back for in-person instruction amid the powerful first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The university successfully maintained operations throughout the semester – with zero COVID-19-related deaths or hospitalizations in the campus community – thanks to its “SHIELD: Target, Test, Tell” program.

During the earliest months of 2020, COVID-19 seemed like an innocuous event that was too geographically distant to affect the Illinois community. In fact, by March 10th there were only 19 confirmed cases. Nevertheless, Nigel Goldenfeld (BCXT leader/GNDP), former Swanlund Endowed Chair and professor of physics, and Sergei Maslov (BCXT/CABBI), a professor of bioengineering and Bliss Faculty Scholar, were worried. The news from China and Italy was concerning and in four days a significant portion of students, faculty, and staff were going to leave for spring break.

In honor of the IGB's anniversary, we're revisiting some of the history of our institute over the past 15 years with a series of articles highlighting IGB people, projects, and research.

It sometimes seems a million doesn’t command quite the same attention that it used to. It isn’t mathematically special. And in today’s society, it isn’t even unusually large. We now live in a world where the population is measured in billions, economies are scaled in trillions and computer calculations are counted by the quadrillion.

But it takes on a very special significance when you’re talking about looking after the well-being of your community in the middle of a globally devastating pandemic.

Researchers affiliated with the Cancer Center at Illinois and the IGB discovered a novel small molecule compound that is now the subject of a new global licensing agreement between the pharmaceutical company Bayer AG and the cancer drug development company Systems Oncology LLC. Systems Oncology originally licensed the IP related to the compound in 2018, and this new deal will now give Bayer the exclusive rights to develop the compound, currently called ERSO, as a cancer therapy.

After a primary tumor is treated, cancer stem cells may still lurk in the body, ready to metastasize and cause a recurrence of the cancer in a form that’s more aggressive and resistant to treatment. University of Illinois researchers have developed a molecular probe that seeks out these elusive cells and lights them up so they can be identified, tracked and studied not only in cell cultures, but in their native environment: the body.