News

New Discoveries December 17, 2025

Artificial sweetener may interfere with immunotherapy

New research from Damon Runyon-Dale F. Frey Breakthrough Scientist Abigail E. Overacre-Delgoffe, PhD, and her lab at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that sucralose—the sugar substitute found in many “sugar-free” sodas, yogurts, and snack foods—may interfere with cancer immunotherapy. Their findings indicate that the widely used artificial sweetener changes the composition of the gut microbiome in ways that weaken patients’ immune systems and blunt the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors, a class of drugs that unleash T cells to attack tumors.

New Discoveries December 10, 2025

How Damon Runyon scientists are making progress against pancreatic cancer

New Discoveries November 19, 2025

Clinical trial shows promising results for head and neck cancer drug

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is the sixth most common cancer globally, and treatment options for patients with advanced disease are limited.

New Discoveries November 10, 2025

The outsider advantage: how extrachromosomal DNA fuels cancer

A basic tenet of biology is that our DNA is stored in chromosomes, that familiar grid of Xs (and sometimes Ys) containing all the instructions for the creation and maintenance of a human body. Another tenet of biology is that all rules have exceptions.

New Discoveries October 16, 2025

Why some patients do not benefit from immunotherapy

Epithelial cells, which line the surfaces of the body, are fixed in place, while mesenchymal cells, which make up the body’s connective tissue, are loosely packed and can move around. During embryonic development and wound healing, cells can transform from epithelial cells into mesenchymal cells, a process known as mesenchymal transformation (MT). Unfortunately, MT is also a useful strategy for cancer cells, whose goal is to spread throughout the body.

New Discoveries October 13, 2025

A step toward overcoming treatment resistance in leukemia

Since the Food and Drug Administration approved the targeted therapy drug venetoclax in 2020, it has become a first-line treatment for acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a blood cancer. Unfortunately, some AMLs have proven resistant to venetoclax—including those caused by mutations in the RAS gene family, which account for 10-20% of all cases.

New Discoveries August 12, 2025

New screening tool seeks to expand clinical trial access

In 2022, the FDA approved the first therapy to target human leukocyte antigen (HLA), which has been implicated in a variety of cancers. (The approved drug, tebentafusp, treats uveal melanoma, an eye cancer.) Last year, another HLA-targeted therapy received FDA approval for the treatment of a sarcoma. There are now a plethora of clinical trials open to patients who are HLA-positive.

New Discoveries July 14, 2025

A potential breakthrough in treating RAS-driven cancers

Cancers caused by mutations in the RAS gene family—which include pancreatic, colorectal, lung, skin, and ovarian cancers, among others—have thwarted drug development efforts for decades.

New Discoveries June 17, 2025

Why chemotherapy triggers nausea—and other gut pain mysteries

Enteroendocrine cells, which line the wall of the gut, secrete hormones that regulate glucose levels, food intake, and stomach emptying. Abnormal activity of these cells can cause gastrointestinal disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), as well as intestinal tumors.

New Discoveries April 17, 2025

Kheewoong Baek, PhD named 2025 Damon Runyon-Meghan E. Raveis Fellow

Kheewoong Baek, PhD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has been named this year’s Damon Runyon-Meghan E. Raveis Fellow. This award honors former Damon Runyon Board Member Meghan Raveis, who tragically passed in a car accident in 2023.

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