A molecular building block of many animal proteins, the amino acid valine, plays a key role in cancerous growth seen in T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a new study shows.

An international team of scientists has created a plan for an accelerated pipeline for developing drug cocktails to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. The pipeline could speed new and better treatments that the newly diagnosed and recently exposed could take at home to prevent serious illness.

Using network modeling, researchers have honed in on a set of gene interactions that are critical to malignancy and likely to be fertile ground for broad cancer therapies.

Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique to barcode individual cells more accurately and efficiently – which could help pave the way for quicker disease diagnosis.

Drugs developed to treat AIDS and HIV could offer hope to patients diagnosed with the most common form of primary brain tumor. The breakthrough is significant because, if further research is conclusive, the anti-retroviral drugs could be prescribed for patients diagnosed with meningioma and acoustic neuroma brain tumors (also known as schwannoma).

Researchers have shown that blocking IL-6 and TNF cytokines provides a more effective approach to preventing life-threatening graft-versus-host-disease, an inflammatory condition that develops in patients after their allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Researchers have discovered that a nanoparticle therapeutic enhances cancer immunotherapy and is a possible new approach in treating malignant pleural effusion (MPE). MPE is the accumulation of fluid between the chest wall and lungs and is accompanied by malignant cells and/or tumors.

Depleting copper levels may reduce the production of energy that cancer cells need to travel and establish themselves in other parts of the body by a process referred to as metastasis, according to a new study. The discovery of the underlying mechanisms of how copper depletion may help reduce metastasis in breast cancer will help inform the design of future clinical trials.

Adding messenger RNA, or mRNA therapy improves the response to cancer immunotherapy in patients who weren’t responding to the treatment, new research shows. Immunotherapy uses the body’s immune system to prevent, control and eliminate cancer.

Researchers have shown, in a small clinical trial, that an immunotherapy harnessing pre-activated natural killer cells can help some children and young adults with recurrent AML and few other treatment options.

Patients with colorectal cancer were among the first to receive targeted therapies. These drugs aim to block the cancer-causing proteins that trigger out-of-control cell growth while sparing healthy tissues. But some patients are not eligible for these treatments because they have cancer-promoting mutations that are believed to cause resistance to these drugs. Now, physician-scientists have used computer modeling and cell studies to discover that more patients may be helped by a common class of targeted therapies than previously thought.

Driving up the immune response at the site of a cancer tumor with nanotechnology may help enhance immunotherapy treatments in advanced stages of the disease, new research in mice suggests.

Artificial intelligence (AI) models that evaluate medical images have potential to speed up and improve accuracy of cancer diagnoses, but they may also be vulnerable to cyberattacks. Researchers simulated an attack that falsified mammogram images, fooling both an AI breast cancer diagnosis model and human breast imaging radiologist experts.

Researchers have identified novel changes in gene network interactions associated with cancer that may lead to new treatment targets for chemotherapy. Their work shows that more than 90% of changes in gene network interactions in nine types of cancer studied are not detectable by current tests focused on changes in gene expression.

Researchers have discovered a nanoparticle released from cells, called a ’supermere,‘ which contains enzymes, proteins and RNA associated with multiple cancers, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and even COVID-19.

Recently published research has found that most cancer-free individuals over age 60 carry at least 100 billion cells harboring at least one oncogenic, or tumor-causing, mutation.

Using cannabis alongside other drugs may come with a significant risk of harmful drug-drug interactions, new research suggests. The researchers looked at cannabinoids–a group of substances found in the cannabis plant — and their major metabolites found in cannabis users‘ blood and found that they interfere with two families of enzymes that help metabolize a wide range of drugs prescribed for a variety of conditions. As a result, either the drugs‘ positive effects might decrease or their negative effects might increase with too much building up in the body, causing unintended side effects such as toxicity or accidental overdose. While more research needs to be done, the authors said one early takeaway from these studies is that it’s important to be careful when using cannabis with other prescription drugs.

Scientists have identified a rare population of potentially toxic senescent cells in human brains that can serve as a target for a new Alzheimer’s disease treatment.

A study in mice has found that stress and tissue damage initiated by angiotensin II, a molecule that is known to increase blood pressure and stiffening in the linings of blood vessels, leads to cellular senescence, a process by which a cell ages and permanently stops dividing but does not die. Importantly, when the researchers eliminated senescent cells from the mice, tissues returned to a normal state in spite of a continued infusion of angiotensin II.

Researchers have demonstrated a major step forward in melding two key methods for studying breast cancer: one by genetic analysis and the second by looking at the architecture of cells, or their pathology. Using The Cancer Genome Atlas Breast Cancer Data set, they developed classification method that divides breast cancers into 12 distinct biological groups. This could aid future research efforts and enable faster translation of molecular findings into the pathology lab for clinical use, they report.

Sonodynamic therapy uses ultrasound in combination with drugs to release harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS) at the site of a tumor. However, the treatment isn’t very effective because cancer cells can activate antioxidant defense systems to counteract it. Now, researchers have breached these defenses with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, allowing sonodynamic therapy to effectively shrink tumors in a mouse model of liver cancer.

Researchers have developed the first metal-organic framework (MOFs) antibody-drug delivery system that has the potential to fast-track potent new therapies for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.

A recent phase II clinical trial results suggest that the monoclonal antibody hu14.18K322A could help change treatment of children with high-risk neuroblastoma.

A research team has succeeded in producing two molecules that are otherwise only formed by microorganisms from extremely contaminated wastewater in an abandoned mine in South Korea. The method, which took four years to develop, could pave the way for new types of drugs.

Good glucose control is important for reduction of cancer risk in obesity and type 2 diabetes. Large durable weight loss, as such, appears to afford protection against cancer, but with good glucose control the number of cancer cases also drops radically, a new study shows.