Yuman Fong, MD

Colon, lung, breast, ovarian, pancreatic — almost a million people will be diagnosed with one of these cancers in the coming year. Can a virus fight them?

Almost everyone knows someone who has battled cancer. Standard care involves chemo and radiation, medication, and immunotherapies. Now, for the first time ever, clinical trials are underway testing a new virus that targets deadly cancer cells and wipes them out.

Colon, lung, breast, ovarian, pancreatic — almost a million people will be diagnosed with one of these cancers in the coming year.

“People over the decades have been trying to find viruses to kill certain types of cancers for a long time,” said City of Hope surgical oncologist, Yuman Fong, MD. “What we decided was that rather than doing that, why don’t we just find viruses that kill any type of cancer… Continue reading.

Scientists have injected a human medical trial participant with a virus that is designed to kill cancer cells.

The treatment is known as oncolytic virus therapy, in which a natural virus is genetically modified to enter cancer cells and replicate itself, thus killing them. Crucially, it’s designed to do this while avoiding healthy cells.

The treatment can also help prime peoples’ immune systems against cancer, according to Imugene Limited, a clinical cancer research company… Continue reading.

Yuman Fong, M.D., the Sangiacomo Family Chair in Surgical Oncology at City of Hope, a world-renowned cancer research and treatment organization, was presented with one of the highest honors in health and medicine today.

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) honored Fong “for transforming the fields of liver surgery, robotics in surgery, imaging and display in medicine, and gene therapy.” His contributions as a surgeon, engineer, innovator and mentor have yielded patents and first-in-human trials that translated scientific discoveries to medicines and medical devices… Continue reading.

A cancer-killing virus that City of Hope scientists developed could one day improve the immune system’s ability to eradicate tumors in colon cancer patients, reports a new study in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The preclinical research is a first step to showing that City of Hope’s oncolytic virus CF33 can target hard-to-treat tumors that “handcuff” the immune system and keep T cells from activating the immune system to kill cancer cells. More specifically, the researchers demonstrated in mouse models that CF33 appears to increase PD-L1 expression in tumor cells and causes them to die in a way that stimulates an influx of activated immune cells… Continue reading.

City of Hope scientists have combined two potent immunotherapies — an oncolytic virus and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy — to target and eradicate solid tumors that are otherwise difficult to treat with CAR T therapy alone, according to a new Science Translational Medicine study.

In preclinical research that could lead to a clinical trial for patients with intractable solid tumors, City of Hope scientists genetically engineered an oncolytic virus to enter tumor cells and force their expression of CD19 protein on their cell surface. Scientists were then able to use CD19-directed CAR T cells to recognize and attack these solid tumors.

CD19-CAR T cell therapy is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat certain types of blood cancers, namely B cell lymphomas and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. This new research may expand the use of CD19-CAR T cells for the treatment of patients with potentially any solid tumor… Continue reading.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the induction of Yuman Fong, MD, Sangiacomo Chair and Chairman, Department of Surgery, City of Hope Medical Center, to its College of Fellows.

Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer. The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering and medicine research, practice, or education” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.”

Dr. Fong was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for “outstanding contributions to innovation in cancer treatment as a physician and scientist.”