The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology has launched a randomized phase III clinical trial called RECIPROCAL (Alliance A032304) to explore whether doctors can optimize the timing of targeted radiation therapy to minimize side effects while preserving efficacy in men with advanced prostate cancer. The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology has launched a randomized phase III clinical trial called RECIPROCAL (Alliance A032304) to explore whether doctors can optimize the timing of targeted radiation therapy to minimize side effects while preserving efficacy in men with advanced prostate cancer.

In the current study, published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Cheng and his colleagues created an exosome system that co-displays two therapeutic proteins to treat lung metastases. One protein blocks the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint pathway, a process that has been shown to boost the immune response against melanoma cells and shrink tumors. The other protein blocks the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway that drives immune exclusion in tumors, a phenomenon where immune cells are unable to infiltrate tumor tissues. 

A large-scale international study, led by researchers from the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University, has uncovered a mechanism that allows breast cancer to send metastases to the brain — a highly lethal occurrence for which there is currently no effective treatment. The findings could enable the development of new drugs and personalized monitoring for early detection and treatment of brain metastases.

This study reveals how lipid metabolism dysregulation promotes colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CRLM) through a novel YTHDF3-mediated mechanism involving m⁶A RNA modification and liquid-liquid phase separation.

 Chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR-NK) cell therapy is emerging as a promising next-generation immunotherapy with the potential to overcome key limitations of current chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T) treatments. 

Cleveland Clinic researchers have discovered that bacteria inside cancerous tumors may be key to understanding why immunotherapy works for some patients but not others.

Two new studies, published simultaneously in Nature Cancer, reveal that elevated levels of bacteria in the tumor microenvironment suppress immune response, driving resistance to immunotherapy in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Why does cancer sometimes recur after chemotherapy? Why do some bacteria survive antibiotic treatment? In many cases, the answer appears to lie not in genetic differences, but in biological noise — random fluctuations in molecular activity that occur even among genetically identical cells.

Biological systems are inherently noisy, as molecules inside living cells are produced, degraded, and interact through fundamentally random processes. Understanding how biological systems cope with such fluctuations — and how they might be controlled — has been a long-standing challenge in systems and synthetic biology.

Although modern biology can regulate the average behavior of a cell population, controlling the unpredictable fluctuations of individual cells has remained a major challenge. These rare “outlier” cells, driven by stochastic variation, can behave differently from the majority and influence system-level outcomes.

This longstanding problem has been answered by a joint research team led by Professor KIM Jae Kyoung (KAIST, IBS Biomedical Mathematics Group), KIM Jinsu (POSTECH), and Professor CHO Byung-Kwan (KAIST), which has developed a novel mathematical framework called the “Noise Controller” (NC). This achievement establishes a level of single-cell precision control previously thought impossible, and it is expected to provide a key breakthrough for longstanding challenges in cancer therapy and synthetic biology.

Within tumors in the human body, there are immune cells (macrophages) capable of fighting cancer, but they have been unable to perform their roles properly due to suppression by the tumor. KAIST researchers have overcome this limitation by developing a new therapeutic approach that directly converts immune cells inside tumors into anticancer cell therapies.