Hi this is Dr. Robert Elliott and I thought it was time to give all of our followers a research update on some exciting evens that have taken place in the last several months. As most of you might know, I was called to Washington and met with the Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Tom Price on April 28, 2017. This was a visit to discuss simplifying regulations for Cancer Immunotherapy in patients being able to use their own autologous tissue for vaccine therapy. At that time, Dr. Price stated when the FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb got confirmed, he would ask for me to come back and meet with him. He has now been confirmed and about 2-3 weeks ago I got a call from Deputy FDA commissioner and we had a conference call about arranging a meeting with the FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. That meeting will also involve regulations for patients having autologous vaccines developed for cancer immunotherapy. Hopefully that meeting will take place soon.
Another great meeting, I had about 3 weeks ago at Florida Atlantic University with a tremendous scientist Dr. Hebert Weissbach. He is working on cancer metabolism as we are. He has done some exciting work on increasing drug sensitivity for cancer therapy. We had a 2 day meeting and it was very exciting and at that time I also was able to meet with Dr. Fred Sancilio. He has a biotechnology company that is doing great things; he is involved in lipid metabolism was very interested in Dr. Weissbach’s research and what we are doing on cancer metabolism and mitochondrial dysfunction. He is very supportive of our work and we are trying to establish a real collaborative effort with Dr. Weissbach and Dr. Sancilio.
We have talked in previous blog posts about mitochondrial organelle transplantation in cancer and we now have evidence that mitochondrial organelle transplantation may also work in neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). This is extremely exiciting and we are pursing that diligently and have met with some scientist that will possibly impact our research. Dr. Jiang and I have been accepted to present a poster presentation and short talk at the AACR regional meeting on Tumor immunology and immunotherapy. That meeting will be in Boston October 1-4, 2017. We are excited to have been accepted to present at that meeting and we will give a follow-up to all of you after we return from Boston.
There is also a great meeting Tripping Over the Truth retreat in Baltimore the first part of November that involves cancer metabolism and mitochondrial dysfunction and we have been invited to be a major participant. We will give you and update on that and hopefully we can have a central area to promote that type of research. We are having a very exciting period and much of you know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month so please feel free to contribute to our Breast Cancer Research at our Breast Foundation if you would like to support our work. We appreciate it and thank you very much and soon there will be more to come about all that has been mentioned.
Thank you,
Robert L Elliott, M.D., Ph.D, D.Sc.
