A team led by Academician Ge Junbo and Professor Sun Aijun at Fudan University reveals that environmental eustress attenuates doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity while enhancing antitumor effects via a hypothalamus-heart-tumor axis. Eustress upregulates hypothalamic BDNF, which activates TrkB receptors on cardiac resident macrophages to inhibit CCL2 secretion, thereby reducing pro-inflammatory Ly6C^high monocyte/macrophage infiltration into heart tissue. In hepatocellular carcinoma models, eustress also downregulates tumor microenvironment CCL2, decreasing immunosuppressive G-MDSCs and M2 macrophages while increasing cytotoxic CD8+ T cells and M1 macrophages. CCL2 is identified as a core dual target for cardio-oncology intervention, providing a safe and accessible non-pharmacological strategy for preventing chemotherapy-related cardiac toxicity in cancer patients.

A research team led by Wenyan Li and Yanfeng Jiang at Fudan University has published study in ENT Discovery, quantifying how lifestyle influences hearing impairment and dissecting the mediating roles of inflammatory and metabolic biomarkers. Based on 441,844 UK Biobank participants followed for a median of 14.22 years, the study found that adherence to an ideal lifestyle was associated with a 14% lower risk of incident hearing impairment compared with a poor lifestyle. Mediation analyses showed metabolic biomarkers—particularly body mass index (BMI) and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c)—accounted for the largest share of the association, while inflammatory pathways played a smaller secondary role. The findings offer mechanistic evidence supporting lifestyle-based interventions for hearing impairment prevention.

Researchers from Keio University have found that D-serine increases the growth of gastric cancer by creating an immunosuppressive and anti-inflammatory tumor microenvironment. Higher levels of D-serine in serum correlated with greater immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy resistance in tumors. Suppressing D-serine in circulation could improve the efficacy of immunotherapies against gastric cancer. These findings position D-serine within the broader field of cancer amino acid metabolism and point to it as a possible target for tumor evasion.