Beyond tumor control: A protocol for multidimensional assessment of long-term effects of intensity-modulated radiotherapy on vision, patient well-being, and morbidity in head and neck cancer
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Nov-2025 13:11 ET (20-Nov-2025 18:11 GMT/UTC)
Bladder cancer ranks among the ten most common types of cancer worldwide. The main treatment is bladder removal surgery, and despite advances in systemic therapies, recurrence is frequent in the most aggressive forms of the disease. For this reason, researchers have been seeking less invasive and more effective strategies to fight it.
A study involving the D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and published in Biochemical Genetics points to a promising path: by blocking a small molecule called miR-21, bladder cancer cells lose their ability to multiply and spread. This discovery could pave the way for future therapies that are both less invasive and more precise.
Researchers from EMBL, the University Medical Center Mainz (UMC Mainz), and the Department of Biomedicine (Basel) have uncovered how chronic inflammation reshapes the human bone marrow environment, where blood stem cells reside, long before leukaemia emerges.
In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists explain how they studied bone marrow samples in individuals with clonal hematopoiesis (CHIP) and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), observing how inflammation played a role in a cancerous progression.
CHIP and MDS patients lose certain healthy stem-cell support cells, which are replaced by inflammatory support cells that become more common as the disease progresses, forming a self-reinforcing inflammatory loop that disrupts normal blood formation.
Overall, the research suggests that inflammatory support cells in the stem cell microenvironment play a key role in damaging the bone marrow early in disease development – potentially offering a new target for treatments that could stop blood disorders from becoming cancerous.
Our body’s “blood factory” consists of specialized tissue made up of bone cells, blood vessels, nerves and other cell types. Now, researchers have succeeded for the first time in recreating this cellular complexity in the laboratory using only human cells. The novel system could reduce the need for animal experiments for many applications.