A smoking cessation program developed by WashU Medicine researchers and deployed at Siteman Cancer Center prolongs life for cancer patients, according to a new study. Regardless of their type of cancer or how advanced it was, cancer patients lived nearly a year longer when they quit smoking compared to patients who continued smoking.

Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint precise areas of the body can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful “off target” effects. Researchers at the UW took a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. By adding smart tail structures to therapeutic proteins, the team demonstrated that the proteins could be “programmed” to act based on the presence of specific environmental cues.