NEW YORK (AP) ? T-Mobile USA, the struggling No. 4 cellphone company, is ditching plans centered on familiar two-year contracts in favor of selling phones on installment plans.
The company changed its website over the weekend to sell the new plans. It was set to lay out the rationale for the change on Tuesday at an event in New York.
T-Mobile has been losing subscribers from its contract-based plans for more than two years, chiefly to bigger competitors Verizon Wireless and AT&T. T-Mobile has done better with contract-less, prepaid plans, but those aren't as profitable for the company.
The new plan blurs the boundaries between the two types. Prepaid plans have lower monthly fees, but the buyer usually has to pay full or nearly full price for the phones. With T-Mobile's new plans, the initial phone-buying experience won't be much different from what it's like for contract plans, but customers could save money in the long run.
For instance, someone who wants a Samsung Galaxy S III would pay $70 upfront and then $90 per month for unlimited calling, text and data. That monthly fee includes $20 to pay off the cost of the phone over two years.
By separating the cost of the phone from the service, T-Mobile is making its plans and upgrade options easier to understand. When the phone is paid off, the $20 fee in that example disappears. On traditional contract-based plans, the buyer is deemed to have "paid off" the phone after a certain period of time and become eligible for a new, subsidized phone, but the monthly payments don't decline.
As before, T-Mobile's prices generally undercut those of the bigger phone companies. The chief downside is that its data network coverage is poorer in rural areas.
T-Mobile stopped short of adopting shared-data plans that Verizon Wireless and AT&T introduced last year. Those plans allow all of a family's devices to share a pool of monthly data usage. Instead, T-Mobile is selling data per line in three tiers. The talk and text portion of the plan comes with 500 megabytes of data usage per month. Adding $10 bumps that to 2 gigabytes per month, while adding $20 provides unlimited data.
A big part of the reason for the exodus of contract-signing customers from T-Mobile is that it, alone among the four national-level cellphone carriers, doesn't offer the iPhone. That's because its network has, until recently, not been able to offer high-speed data service to iPhones. It's now able to offer high-speed data to iPhones in some cities, and had been trying to persuade iPhone owners who have come off their contracts with AT&T to move the phones over to T-Mobile.
(Reuters) - Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a longtime family friend of a prime suspect in the shooting death of the state's prisons chief, said on Sunday that the now-dead suspect always seemed to suffer from a "streak of cruelty and anger."
Hickenlooper said he and Jack Ebel, the father of white supremacist ex-convict Evan Ebel, had been friends for more than 30 years and that he had spoken to him since the 28-year-old parolee from Denver emerged as a lead suspect in the shooting last Tuesday of Tom Clements, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections.
"From the beginning, his son just seemed to have this bad streak, a streak of cruelty and anger," Hickenlooper told CNN's "State of the Union."
"They did everything they could," he said. "They worked with Evan again and again but to no avail. He had a bad, bad streak."
Evan Ebel was killed by police on Thursday after a high-speed chase through Decatur, Texas. He is also a suspect in the killing of pizza delivery man Nathan Leon in Denver, police there have said.
Hickenlooper said an investigation is continuing and that "all the signs" in the Clements killing seemed to point to Ebel, whom he confirmed had been connected to a prison-based white supremacist group.
"We can't see clearly what a motive was," he added.
The governor, who said his own personal security had been beefed up recent days, did not rule out the possibility that the Clements killing had been ordered by jailed white supremacist gang leaders targeting public officials from behind bars.
Lieutenant Jeff Kramer, a spokesman for the sheriff's office in El Paso County, Colorado, said on Sunday that Evan Ebel was definitely considered a suspect in the death of Clements, 58, who was shot on Tuesday when he answered the door at his home about 45 miles south of Denver.
Shell casings found at Clements' home were the same brand and caliber of the Hornady 9-mm bullets Ebel fired at Texas police, according to the search warrant filed in Texas for police to search Ebel's Cadillac.
"We're still waiting for the results of some ballistics testing that we're doing up here in Colorado ... to see if the gun used in Texas is the same gun used in the Tom Clements homicide case," Kramer said.
Ebel was a member of a white supremacist prison gang, the 211 Crew, and had been paroled in the Denver area, a law enforcement official said.
Authorities have said they were looking for ties between the death of Clements and the January killing of Mark Hasse, a prosecutor in the Kaufman County District Attorney's Office. Kaufman County is east of Dallas.
(Reporting by Tom Brown; Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Christopher Wilson)
Sure Barnes & Noble's already promising you the ability to download the "most popular and bestselling top 100 app titles for tablets available anywhere," but what happens when you want to buy something in those apps? Fear not, the bookstore-turned-hardware-maker will be bringing in-app purchases to its line of slates "soon," thanks to a partnership with Nook developer Fortumo. That company's bring single click payment to the Nook ecosystem and offering dashboards and analytics on consumer buying habits for developers. Thanks to the offering, B&N feels certain that, "thousands of the most-requested games and apps featuring in-app purchasing will be available for customers to experience on NOOK's award-winning line of tablets" in the months to come.
Shazam, the erstwhile exclusively music discovery app that has expanded into TV as a companion app letting users 'tag' TV shows (and ads) to get quick access to a plethora of related content, has today named a new chief product officer -- poaching Daniel Danker from the BBC to lead "the product expansion of the Shazam service".
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit behind a synchronized cyberattack in South Korea last week. But in Seoul, the focus remains fixed on North Korea, where South Korean security experts say Pyongyang has been training a team of computer-savvy "cyber warriors" as cyberspace becomes a fertile battleground in the standoff between the two Koreas.
Malware shut down 32,000 computers and servers at three major South Korean TV networks and three banks last Wednesday, disrupting communications and banking businesses, officials said. The investigation into who planted the malware could take weeks or even months.
South Korean investigators have produced no proof yet that North Korea was behind the cyberattack, and on Friday said the malware was traced to a Seoul computer. But South Korea has pointed the finger at Pyongyang in six cyberattacks since 2009, even creating a cyber security command center in Seoul to protect the Internet-dependent country from hackers from the North.
It may seem unlikely that impoverished North Korea, with one of the most restrictive Internet policies in the world, would have the ability to threaten affluent South Korea, a country considered a global leader in telecommunications. The average yearly income in North Korea was just $1,190 per person in 2011 ? just a fraction of the average yearly income of $22,200 for South Koreans that same year, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul.
But over the past several years, North Korea has poured money and resources into science and technology. In December, scientists succeeded in launching a satellite into space aboard a long-range rocket from its own soil. And in February, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, its third.
"IT" has become a buzzword in North Korea, which has developed its own operating system called Red Star. The regime also encouraged a passion for gadgets among its elite, introducing a Chinese-made tablet computer for the North Korean market. Teams of developers came up with software for everything from composing music to learning how to cook.
But South Korea and the U.S. believe North Korea also has thousands of hackers trained by the state to carry its warfare into cyberspace, and that their cyber offensive skills are as good as or better than their counterparts in China and South Korea.
"The newest addition to the North Korean asymmetric arsenal is a growing cyber warfare capability," James Thurman, commander of the U.S. forces in South Korea, told U.S. legislators in March 2012. "North Korea employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyber-infiltration and cyber-attacks" against South Korea and the U.S.
In 2010, Won Sei-hoon, then chief of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, put the number of professional hackers in North Korea's cyber warfare unit at 1,000.
North Korean students are recruited to the nation's top science schools to become "cyber warriors," said Kim Heung-kwang, who said he trained future hackers at a university in the industrial North Korean city of Hamhung for two decades before defecting in 2003. He said future hackers also are sent to study abroad in China and Russia.
In 2009, then-leader Kim Jong Il ordered Pyongyang's "cyber command" expanded to 3,000 hackers, he said, citing a North Korean government document that he said he obtained that year. The veracity of the document could not be independently confirmed.
Kim Heung-kwang, who has lived in Seoul since 2004, speculated that more have been recruited since then, and said some are based in China to infiltrate networks abroad.
What is clear is that "North Korea has a capacity to send malware to personal computers, servers or networks and to launch DDOS-type attacks," he said. "Their targets are the United States and South Korea."
Expanding its warfare into cyberspace by developing malicious computer codes is cheaper and faster for North Korean than building nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destructions. The online world allows for anonymity because it is easy to fabricate IP addresses and destroy the evidence leading back to the hackers, according to C. Matthew Curtin, founder of Interhack Corp.
Thurman said cyberattacks are "ideal" for North Korea because they can take place relatively anonymously. He said cyberattacks have been waged against military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions.
North Korean officials have not acknowledged allegations that computer experts are trained as hackers, and have refuted many of the cyberattack accusations. Pyongyang has not commented on the most recent widespread attack in South Korea.
In June 2012, a seven-month investigation into a hacking incident that disabled news production system at the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo led to North Korea's government telecommunications center, South Korean officials said.
In South Korea, the economy, commerce and every aspect of daily life is deeply dependent on the Internet, making it ripe grounds for a disruptive cyberattack.
In North Korea, in contrast, is just now getting online. Businesses are starting to use online banking services and debit cards have grown in popularity. But only a sliver of the population has access to the global Internet, meaning an Internet outage last week ? which Pyongyang blamed on hackers from Seoul and Washington ? had little bearing on most North Koreans.
"North Korea has nothing to lose in a cyber battle," said Kim Seeongjoo, a professor at Seoul-based Korea University's Department of Cyber Defense. "Even if North Korea turns out to be the attacker behind the broadcasters' hacking, there is no target for South Korean retaliation."
___
Associated Press writer Jean H. Lee contributed to this story with reporting from Pyongyang, North Korea; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul also contributed to this report. Follow AP tech writer Youkyung Lee at www.twittter.com/YKLeeAP and AP Korea bureau chief Jean H. Lee at www.twitter.com/newsjean.
T-cell therapy eradicates an aggressive leukemia in 2 childrenPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Holly Auer holly.auer@uphs.upenn.edu 215-200-2313 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
CHOP/PennMedicine Oncology team reports complete remission in pediatric ALL patients
Philadelphia, March 25, 2013 - Two children with an aggressive form of childhood leukemia had a complete remission of their disease-showing no evidence of cancer cells in their bodies-after treatment with a novel cell therapy that reprogrammed their immune cells to rapidly multiply and destroy leukemia cells. A research team from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania published the case report of two pediatric patients Online First today in The New England Journal of Medicine. It will appear in the April 18 print issue.
One of the patients, 7-year-old Emily Whitehead, was featured in news stories in December 2012 after the experimental therapy led to her dramatic recovery after she relapsed following conventional treatment. Emily remains healthy and cancer-free, 11 months after receiving bioengineered T cells that zeroed in on a target found in this type of leukemia, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
The other patient, a 10-year-old girl, who also had a complete response to the same treatment, suffered a relapse two months later when other leukemia cells appeared that did not harbor the specific cell receptor targeted by the therapy.
"This study describes how these cells have a potent anticancer effect in children," said co-first author Stephan A. Grupp, M.D., Ph.D., of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where both patients were treated in this clinical trial. "However, we also learned that in some patients with ALL, we will need to further modify the treatment to target other molecules on the surface of leukemia cells."
Grupp is the director of Translational Research for the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael Kalos, Ph.D., an adjunct associate professor in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn, is co-first author on the study.
The current study builds on Grupp's ongoing collaboration with Penn Medicine scientists who originally developed the modified T cells as a treatment for B-cell leukemias. The Penn team reported on early successful results of a trial using this cell therapy in three adult chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients in August of 2011. Two of those patients remain in remission more than 2 years following their treatment, and as the Penn researchers reported in December 2012 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, seven out of ten adult patients treated at that point responded to the therapy. The team is led by the current study's senior author, Carl H. June, M.D., the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Translational Research in Penn's Abramson Cancer Center.
"We're hopeful that our efforts to treat patients with these personalized cellular therapies will reduce or even replace the need for bone marrow transplants, which carry a high mortality risk and require long hospitalizations," June said. "In the long run, if the treatment is effective in these late-stage patients, we would like to explore using it up front, and perhaps arrive at a point where leukemia can be treated without chemotherapy."
The research team colleagues adapted the original CLL treatment to combat another B-cell leukemia: ALL, which is the most common childhood cancer. After decades of research, oncologists can currently cure 85 percent of children with ALL. Both children in the current study had a high-risk type of ALL that stubbornly resists conventional treatments.
The new study used a relatively new approach in cancer treatment: immunotherapy, which manipulates the immune system to increase its cancer-fighting capabilities. Here the researchers engineered T cells to selectively kill another type of immune cell called B cells, which had become cancerous.
T cells are the workhorses of the immune system, recognizing and attacking invading disease cells. However, cancer cells fly under the radar of immune surveillance, evading detection by T cells. The new approach custom-designs T cells to "see" and attack the cancer cells.
The researchers removed some of each patient's own T cells and modified them in the laboratory to create a type of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) cell called a CTL019 cell. These cells are designed to attack a protein called CD19 that occurs only on the surface of certain B cells.
By creating an antibody that recognizes CD19 and then connecting that antibody to T cells, the researchers created in CTL019 cells a sort of guided missile that locks in on and kills B cells, thereby attacking B-cell leukemia. After being returned to the patient's body, the CTL019 cells multiply a thousand times over and circulate throughout the body. Importantly, they persist for months afterward, guarding against a recurrence of this specific type of leukemia.
While the CTL019 cells eliminate leukemia, they also can generate an overactive immune response, called a cytokine release syndrome, involving dangerously high fever, low blood pressure, and other side effects. This complication was especially severe in Emily, and her hospital team needed to provide her with treatments that rapidly relieved the treatment-related symptoms by blunting the immune overresponse, while still preserving the modified T cells' anti-leukemia activity.
"The comprehensive testing plan that we have put in place to study patients' blood and bone marrow while they're undergoing this therapy is allowing us to be able to follow how the T cells are behaving in patients in real time, and guides us to be able to design more detailed and specific experiments to answer critical questions that come up from our studies," Kalos said.
The CTL019 therapy eliminates all B cells that carry the CD19 cell receptor: healthy cells as well as those with leukemia. Patients can live without B cells, although they require regular replacement infusions of immunoglobulin, which can be given at home, to perform the immune function normally provided by B cells.
The research team continues to refine their approach using this new technology and explore reasons why some patients may not respond to the therapy or may experience a recurrence of their disease. Grupp said the appearance of the CD19-negative leukemia cells in the second child may have resulted from her prior treatments. Unlike Emily, the second patient had received an umbilical cord cell transplant from a matched donor, so her engineered T cells were derived from her donor (transplanted) cells, with no additional side effects. Oncologists had previously treated her with blinatumomab, a monoclonal antibody, in hopes of fighting the cancer. The prior treatments may have selectively favored a population of CD19-negative T cells.
"The emergence of tumor cells that no longer contain the target protein suggests that in particular patients with high-risk ALL, we may need to broaden the treatment to include additional T cells that may go after additional targets," added Grupp. "However, the initial results with this immune-based approach are encouraging, and may later even be developed into treatments for other types of cancer."
###
Funding from the National Institutes of Health (grants 1RO1 CA165206, R01 CA102646 and R01 CA116660), the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy supported this study.
In August 2012, the University of Pennsylvania and Novartis announced an exclusive global research and licensing agreement to further study and commercialize these novel cellular immunotherapies using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technologies. As part of the transaction, Novartis acquired exclusive rights from Penn to CART-19, the therapy that was the subject of this clinical trial and which is now known as CTL019.
"Chimeric Antigen Receptor-Modified T Cells for Acute Lymphoid Leukemia," New England Journal of Medicine, Online First, March 25, 2013. To appear in print April 18, 2013.
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia:
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 516-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
About Penn Medicine:
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include:
The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Penn Medicine also includes additional patient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
A Joint Press Release from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Contacts:
Rachel Salis-Silverman
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Phone: 267-426-6063 Salis@email.chop.edu
Holly Auer
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
T-cell therapy eradicates an aggressive leukemia in 2 childrenPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Holly Auer holly.auer@uphs.upenn.edu 215-200-2313 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
CHOP/PennMedicine Oncology team reports complete remission in pediatric ALL patients
Philadelphia, March 25, 2013 - Two children with an aggressive form of childhood leukemia had a complete remission of their disease-showing no evidence of cancer cells in their bodies-after treatment with a novel cell therapy that reprogrammed their immune cells to rapidly multiply and destroy leukemia cells. A research team from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania published the case report of two pediatric patients Online First today in The New England Journal of Medicine. It will appear in the April 18 print issue.
One of the patients, 7-year-old Emily Whitehead, was featured in news stories in December 2012 after the experimental therapy led to her dramatic recovery after she relapsed following conventional treatment. Emily remains healthy and cancer-free, 11 months after receiving bioengineered T cells that zeroed in on a target found in this type of leukemia, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
The other patient, a 10-year-old girl, who also had a complete response to the same treatment, suffered a relapse two months later when other leukemia cells appeared that did not harbor the specific cell receptor targeted by the therapy.
"This study describes how these cells have a potent anticancer effect in children," said co-first author Stephan A. Grupp, M.D., Ph.D., of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where both patients were treated in this clinical trial. "However, we also learned that in some patients with ALL, we will need to further modify the treatment to target other molecules on the surface of leukemia cells."
Grupp is the director of Translational Research for the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael Kalos, Ph.D., an adjunct associate professor in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn, is co-first author on the study.
The current study builds on Grupp's ongoing collaboration with Penn Medicine scientists who originally developed the modified T cells as a treatment for B-cell leukemias. The Penn team reported on early successful results of a trial using this cell therapy in three adult chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients in August of 2011. Two of those patients remain in remission more than 2 years following their treatment, and as the Penn researchers reported in December 2012 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, seven out of ten adult patients treated at that point responded to the therapy. The team is led by the current study's senior author, Carl H. June, M.D., the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Translational Research in Penn's Abramson Cancer Center.
"We're hopeful that our efforts to treat patients with these personalized cellular therapies will reduce or even replace the need for bone marrow transplants, which carry a high mortality risk and require long hospitalizations," June said. "In the long run, if the treatment is effective in these late-stage patients, we would like to explore using it up front, and perhaps arrive at a point where leukemia can be treated without chemotherapy."
The research team colleagues adapted the original CLL treatment to combat another B-cell leukemia: ALL, which is the most common childhood cancer. After decades of research, oncologists can currently cure 85 percent of children with ALL. Both children in the current study had a high-risk type of ALL that stubbornly resists conventional treatments.
The new study used a relatively new approach in cancer treatment: immunotherapy, which manipulates the immune system to increase its cancer-fighting capabilities. Here the researchers engineered T cells to selectively kill another type of immune cell called B cells, which had become cancerous.
T cells are the workhorses of the immune system, recognizing and attacking invading disease cells. However, cancer cells fly under the radar of immune surveillance, evading detection by T cells. The new approach custom-designs T cells to "see" and attack the cancer cells.
The researchers removed some of each patient's own T cells and modified them in the laboratory to create a type of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) cell called a CTL019 cell. These cells are designed to attack a protein called CD19 that occurs only on the surface of certain B cells.
By creating an antibody that recognizes CD19 and then connecting that antibody to T cells, the researchers created in CTL019 cells a sort of guided missile that locks in on and kills B cells, thereby attacking B-cell leukemia. After being returned to the patient's body, the CTL019 cells multiply a thousand times over and circulate throughout the body. Importantly, they persist for months afterward, guarding against a recurrence of this specific type of leukemia.
While the CTL019 cells eliminate leukemia, they also can generate an overactive immune response, called a cytokine release syndrome, involving dangerously high fever, low blood pressure, and other side effects. This complication was especially severe in Emily, and her hospital team needed to provide her with treatments that rapidly relieved the treatment-related symptoms by blunting the immune overresponse, while still preserving the modified T cells' anti-leukemia activity.
"The comprehensive testing plan that we have put in place to study patients' blood and bone marrow while they're undergoing this therapy is allowing us to be able to follow how the T cells are behaving in patients in real time, and guides us to be able to design more detailed and specific experiments to answer critical questions that come up from our studies," Kalos said.
The CTL019 therapy eliminates all B cells that carry the CD19 cell receptor: healthy cells as well as those with leukemia. Patients can live without B cells, although they require regular replacement infusions of immunoglobulin, which can be given at home, to perform the immune function normally provided by B cells.
The research team continues to refine their approach using this new technology and explore reasons why some patients may not respond to the therapy or may experience a recurrence of their disease. Grupp said the appearance of the CD19-negative leukemia cells in the second child may have resulted from her prior treatments. Unlike Emily, the second patient had received an umbilical cord cell transplant from a matched donor, so her engineered T cells were derived from her donor (transplanted) cells, with no additional side effects. Oncologists had previously treated her with blinatumomab, a monoclonal antibody, in hopes of fighting the cancer. The prior treatments may have selectively favored a population of CD19-negative T cells.
"The emergence of tumor cells that no longer contain the target protein suggests that in particular patients with high-risk ALL, we may need to broaden the treatment to include additional T cells that may go after additional targets," added Grupp. "However, the initial results with this immune-based approach are encouraging, and may later even be developed into treatments for other types of cancer."
###
Funding from the National Institutes of Health (grants 1RO1 CA165206, R01 CA102646 and R01 CA116660), the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy supported this study.
In August 2012, the University of Pennsylvania and Novartis announced an exclusive global research and licensing agreement to further study and commercialize these novel cellular immunotherapies using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technologies. As part of the transaction, Novartis acquired exclusive rights from Penn to CART-19, the therapy that was the subject of this clinical trial and which is now known as CTL019.
"Chimeric Antigen Receptor-Modified T Cells for Acute Lymphoid Leukemia," New England Journal of Medicine, Online First, March 25, 2013. To appear in print April 18, 2013.
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia:
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 516-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
About Penn Medicine:
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include:
The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Penn Medicine also includes additional patient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
A Joint Press Release from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Contacts:
Rachel Salis-Silverman
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Phone: 267-426-6063 Salis@email.chop.edu
Holly Auer
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NBC's Chris Hansen. Chris is known for his show 'To Catch a Predator' and this Sunday he is airing a special on Dateline to try and catch one of the FBI's Most wanted Fugitives!
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Noah Munck, best known as Gibby Gibson, the scene-stealing, shirt-shedding lovable pal on Nickelodeon?s hit television series iCarly joins Nia & Friends.
Israel Houghton, 5 Time Grammy Winner who is mostly known for his cross-cultural style of Christian music that fuses elements from gospel, jazz and rock joins Get Real Live.
Marly Bird welcomes John Levisay and Josh Scott, Owners of Craftsy.com to discuss their journey from Ebay to the crafting industry. Quilting, Knitting and Cake
Charles Lanktree, CEO of Eggland?s Best eggs will share his strategies for success, dedication to quality and his secret to building the #1 branded egg in the world.
Shazam, the erstwhile exclusively music discovery app that has expanded into TV as a companion app letting users 'tag' TV shows (and ads) to get quick access to a plethora of related content, has today named a new chief product officer -- poaching Daniel Danker from the BBC to lead "the product expansion of the Shazam service".![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sio1CNPeQv_nJ_LlHaUOqj5HfCvSifhN4HPWNAocg1Q0mdoDb82apDBHr1Mi_nqZltIXevJ2QoD-QbJyc1HU9YYpK9kqFWNQnb1x342XY=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 25-Mar-2013
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