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New DiscoveriesJuly 18, 2023

A new way to visualize antibody-virus data

If you asked a hundred people to rate a hundred movies, you would generate enough data to be able to make some predictions. Someone who enjoyed Notting Hill would likely enjoy Pretty Woman, for instance; the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie will likely be a hit with longtime Marvel fans. This is an example of a bipartite dataset, which measures interactions between two types of entries—in this case, movies and viewers—and can be used not only to predict unmeasured interactions but also to reveal the underlying rules governing a system.

New DiscoveriesJuly 5, 2023

Immunotherapy before and after surgery shows benefit for lung cancer patients

At the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, held this spring in Orlando, former Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator John V. Heymach, MD, PhD, started with the bad news.

New DiscoveriesMay 31, 2023

Disrupting the “Goldilocks” state of lymphoma cells

In the context of cancer, “drug addiction” has a different meaning—counterintuitively, it’s when cancer cells, not patients, depend on continuous treatment for survival. This can happen if, after the drug target is inhibited, some compensatory signaling pathway is turned on that serves a similar function in the cancer cell. When drug treatment stops, the cell goes into “withdrawal” and this alternative pathway becomes overactive, so much so that it leads to cell death.

New DiscoveriesMay 30, 2023

Discovery of new antibodies paves the way for safer targeted therapies

Due to their critical role in so many cellular functions, proteins that span the cell membrane are the target of more than half of all FDA-approved drugs. Some of these transmembrane proteins are single-pass, meaning they cross the membrane only once, while others are more complex, multipass proteins, meaning they cross the membrane in at least two places. Drugs targeting the latter are primarily small molecule inhibitors, named for their size relative to antibodies and other large proteins.

New DiscoveriesMay 16, 2023

Crossing the blood-brain barrier to deliver lifesaving drugs

A major challenge in treating brain cancer is delivering drugs across the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the dense network of cells and blood vessels that prevents toxins and pathogens from entering the brain. Unfortunately, the BBB also bars entry to therapeutic molecules, leaving highly toxic radiation or chemotherapy treatment as the only recourse for many patients with brain cancer.

New DiscoveriesApril 26, 2023

New immunotherapy-enhancing drug making its way to the clinic

Cancer immunotherapies work by triggering the body’s immune response against tumors. Tumor cells can evade destruction by the immune system, however, by attracting helper T cells, the “peacekeepers” of the immune system. Unlike cytotoxic T cells, which attack and kill pathogens, helper T cells suppress the immune response, essentially telling killer immune cells to “stand down.” While helper T cell function is vital for preventing autoimmune flare-ups, cancer cells can exploit this function, luring the immune system into a false sense of calm when there is in fact a threat.

New DiscoveriesApril 26, 2023

Searching for an Achilles’ heel in brain cancer cells

Glioblastomas (GBMs) are the most common—and the most aggressive—type of cancer originating in the brain. Part of the reason these tumors are so hard to treat is that the cancer cells suppress the immune cells that enter their environment. Not only can they outcompete immune cells for critical nutrients, effectively starving the immune cells, but some GBMs can even adjust their metabolism to produce metabolites that directly inhibit immune cell activity.

New DiscoveriesApril 19, 2023

New role for tumor suppressor gene in pancreatic cancer

P53, the most frequently mutated gene across all human cancers, is mutated in the majority of pancreatic cancers. But despite the overwhelming evidence that p53 mutations contribute to cancer progression, therapies targeting mutant p53 have had limited success, suggesting an incomplete understanding of the protein’s function. In order to understand what goes wrong when p53 mutates, researchers need a clearer picture of how normal p53 prevents tumor development in the first place.

New DiscoveriesMarch 13, 2023

How HPV hijacks the genome to drive cancer development

Human papillomavirus (HPV) was first identified as a cancer driver in the 1970s, when a German doctor named Harald zur Hausen discovered that the virus causes about 75% of human cervical cancers. HPV has since been linked to several other types of human cancer, including head and neck cancer, as discovered by then-Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD, in 2000.

New DiscoveriesMarch 3, 2023

Toward a new understanding of cancer metabolism

Cancer cells are often assumed to be “hypermetabolic,” meaning their energy-producing cycles run on overdrive to fuel the uncontrolled division and growth that defines a tumor. But new findings from former Damon Runyon Fellow Caroline R. Bartman, PhD, and her colleagues at Princeton University challenge this assumption, revealing how much we still have to learn about cancer metabolism.