Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in American men, second only to skin cancer. One in eight men will develop the disease in his lifetime. While nearly 250,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, research has shown that the disease is often more aggressive and more deadly for African American men.

A new data portal called Cancer-Immu established by a team of Vanderbilt University Medical Center biostatisticians can help cancer clinicians and researchers predict which patients will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors. With data from 3,652 samples for 16 cancer types, Cancer-Immu is the largest immune checkpoint blockade-related data portal for exploring immunogenomic connections.

What The Study Did: This analysis including 7.8 million patients found significant disparities in the incidence of localized and metastatic prostate cancer between African American and white veterans treated in the Veterans Affairs health care system.

After birth, the human mouth quickly becomes a hotbed of microbial variation. Streptococcus species largely dominate the oral cavity for the first 6 weeks of life, but the bacterial population diversifies with age and experience. Researchers study this early development, in part, to understand connections between the oral microbiota and associated diseases. An infant’s mother is likely a major source—if not the most important one—of the early oral microbiota. This week in mBio, dental researchers in Japan report a new analysis of how new mothers share microbes with newborns.

MD Anderson and Eisbach Bio have announced a strategic collaboration to jointly discover and develop new drugs that target synthetic lethal vulnerabilities in cancer.

Some of prostate cancers include a small number of aggressive cells hiding among the indolent ones like wolves in a herd of sheep. Researchers at Duke Health have identified a molecular signature that can spot these lurking threats.