TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology) has announced Maralice Conacci-Sorrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, as the recipient of the 2026 Mary Beth Maddox Award and Lectureship in cancer research. She was chosen for her pioneering research revealing how cancer cells harness nutrients to drive their growth and for creating targeted strategies to suppress otherwise untreatable cancers.

Animal models often fail to capture the complexity of human skin diseases. At TU Wien, scientists are using 3D printing to build living skin models that better reflect human biology and immune responses. A newly published paper shows how these bioprinted tissues can support research into inflammatory skin diseases and the development of new treatments.

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) are molecules that can eliminate disease-causing proteins, but developing them is often slow and complex, limiting how quickly new candidates can be tested. Now, researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed a three-step "click chemistry" assembly line that rapidly builds functional PROTACs from simple building blocks. The resulting molecules successfully degraded a target protein in cells, paving the way for faster, more flexible development of protein-targeting therapeutics.

Kyoto, Japan -- Colorectal cancer, or CRC, is the world's second most lethal cancer based on the number of deaths, and is the third most prevalent malignant tumor. Doctors and patients have long been hoping for better diagnostics for prognosis, such as molecular subtyping, which uses data collected from cancer stem cells, or tumor-initiating cells, to further divide one type of cancer into subgroups. It may correlate with patient outcomes and enable better prognoses.

Though many CRC tissue samples have been analyzed and classified based on mRNA gene expression, currently the practical application of these studies in patient prognosis is limited for colorectal cancer. This motivated a team of researchers from Kyoto University to examine cancer stem cells for the molecular subtyping of CRC.

"We need more comprehensive and clinically useful markers and their signatures to help predict the outcome of each patient," says first author Fumihiko Kakizaki.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba have developed a novel analytical framework to reconstruct species distributional shifts from the past to the present while explicitly incorporating within-population genetic diversity. Using this approach, they resolved the high-resolution distributional history of wild black pepper (Piper nigrum)—the world's most valuable spice—which originated in the Western Ghats of India and traced its range dynamics from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the present.

A research team led by Prof. Tao Jiang and Prof. Jing Li from State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Academy of Military Medical Science, in collaboration with Prof. Shi-Shun Zhao from College of Mathematics, Jilin University and Prof. Jianwei Wang from NHC Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens and Christophe Merieux Laboratory, National Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, developed a viral risk prediction framework named GIVAL based on the pre-trained viral protein language model vBERT. This study proposes a general intelligent prediction method for assessing adaptation risks of unknown viruses.