Article

Tumor-Typing: A New Way of Assessing Cancer Treatment Options

A method of analyzing tumors could inform response to immunotherapies.  You can probably guess how your closest friend will react to a particular situation: It’s an intuition that arises out of the database of knowledge about her built up over years and stored in your mind. Predicting how someone might react to a treatment, though, is a process that has vexed researchers working in the burgeoning field of precision medicine. How can they “know” a patient’s immune system, a patient’s cancer, and...

Not Just Cosmetic: The Pain of Alopecia and the Search for A Cure

The phrase “only skin deep” implies that looks are superficial — and insignificant. But we regularly judge, and choose whether or not to connect with, other people based on how they look. That’s why the patchy hair loss experienced by sufferers of Alopecia areata (AA), an autoimmune disease, brings additional losses for patients: Possibly a loss of identity, or even a loss of contentment and wellbeing. “I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, it’s just hair,’” says Lisa Gregory, who suffers from a...

Inside a Cytokine Storm: When Your Immune System is Too Strong

The vast majority of people who suffer severe complications from influenza are elderly or have compromised immune systems. In fact, almost 90% of people who die as a result of a flu infection in the United States are over 65, an age when the immune system’s ability to fight infection begins to wane. But with the fiercest flu season in almost a decade occurring in 2018, news stories about otherwise healthy adults succumbing to the influenza virus were alarmingly common. Why? Ironically, in most...

Attacking Cancer Cells That Develop Resistance

When cancer patients receive therapy for an extended time, they often face the specter of drug resistance as tumor cells mutate and find ways to evade the cancer-killing medicines. Exploring new ways to disarm rogue cells that have developed resistance is a major field of modern cancer research. One way to address the issue of resistance is to attack cancer through the fundamental processes that drive their core mission — to multiply unchecked and invade healthy organs. Unlike traditional...

Brenda Carrillo-Conde: Unlocking the Power of Connections

Brenda Carrillo-Conde has a talent for conjugation: making connections for the greater good — inside the lab and out. As a principal scientist with Pfizer’s Conjugation and Polytide Process Development Group in St. Louis, Missouri, she spends her workdays using chemical conjugation to improve the effectiveness of vaccines and medicines.  In the lab, conjugation is a process that connects molecules together by a system of strong bonds and has a wide-range of real-world applications.  “It has a...

Using the Dr. Jekyll of Chemical Compounds to Advance Drug Synthesis

Sulfuryl fluoride gas is the chemical equivalent of Mr. Hyde. Like the fictional monster, it’s dangerous and difficult to work with. But by inventing a process that creates a new substance called [4-(Acetylamino)phenyl]-ImidodiSulfuryl diFluoride, referred to as AISF, scientists are replacing the gas with the chemical equivalent of Dr. Jekyll. In its new state, it shares several characteristics with the good doctor, like being handy in a laboratory setting.  In its Mr. Hyde form of a colorless...

Purpose & Ideals

Traveling Nine Thousand Miles to Help End Trachoma

Antibiotics are a key component in the global effort to eliminate trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. One of several neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified for elimination, trachoma is a preventable disease, and one that affects those living in communities with limited access to healthcare, clean water and sanitation. Pfizer is proud to contribute to trachoma elimination efforts through the donation of an antibiotic used to...

Purpose & Ideals

Día de la Mujer Latina: Promoting Healthy Behaviors

As part of its commitment to improving health equity across multicultural populations, Pfizer has been partnering with Día de la Mujer Latina (DML), a nationally recognized, grassroots community-based organization dedicated to eliminating health disparities among Latino populations. Since 1997, the mission of Día de la Mujer Latina has focused on promoting healthy behaviors within the underserved Latino community. Día de la Mujer Latina seeks to do so by providing a culturally and...

The ‘Ecology’ of Cancer: Studying the ‘Soil’ that Enables the Disease to Thrive

Borrowing from the field of ecology, cancer is now being examined in terms of the relationship between a cancer cell and the traits of its local environment — the tissue, cells and blood vessels — that help it to thrive. The severity of a cancer diagnosis is most often viewed through the lens of its stage (I – IV), which defines whether a tumor is isolated to its original location or has metastasized, potentially becoming more dangerous by spreading to other parts of the body. Recent research...

How to Deal Dangerous Proteins a Knockout Blow

In the genteel game of croquet, the goal is deceptively straightforward: to hit your ball through a series of hoops before your opponent does. However, anyone who has picked up a mallet knows the sport can get downright cutthroat. A strong player with the right strategy can hit her opponent’s ball so far away that it essentially knocks him out of the game.That’s similar to what scientists are starting to do with certain types of harmful proteins in the body. Of course, most proteins aren’t bad...

Purpose & Ideals

How to Rid the World of Neglected Tropical Diseases

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) affect over one billion people worldwide. This group of viral, bacterial and parasitic diseases can be found in 149 countries – that’s 76 percent of countries in the world – and most often affects impoverished populations, who lack access to clean water or sanitation and live in close contact with infectious vectors. The effects of NTDs on communities can be devastating – keeping children out of school and preventing adults from going to work or caring for...

Banking on the British Exome

The vast UK Biobank is a treasure trove of genetic data. Scientists are mining it now for potential therapeutic gems.  Genetic discoveries that could help treat diseases require a large number of human subjects. That’s why the UK Biobank is such a boon to science: From 2006 to 2010, the Biobank, established by the Wellcome Trust medical charity along with other foundations and government agencies, managed a feat that is a biomedical researcher’s dream: It recruited 500,000 people between the...