Researchers at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) have identified a ‘master switch’ responsible for driving tumour growth in an aggressive form of breast cancer. Blocking the switch with a targeted drug was also found to reduce cancer cell growth and reduce its spread.

This World Breast Cancer Research Day, the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology is highlighting the importance of clinical research in advancing better treatments and improving early detection to ultimately help prevent and cure breast cancer. Although both men and women can develop breast cancer, the disease disproportionately affects women. On average, women in the United States have about a 1 in 8 chance of developing breast cancer during their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute. In 2026, an estimated 321,910 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and about 42,140 will die from the disease. An estimated 2,670 men will also be diagnosed with breast cancer this year.   

>Solving the problem of mRNA-loaded lipid nanoparticles accumulating in the liver and causing unintended expression of pharmacologically active proteins

>By coating the walls of intrahepatic capillaries (liver sinusoidal walls), the accumulation of lipid nanoparticles in the liver is prevented (demonstrated in animal studies)

>Improved efficacy and safety in infectious prevention vaccines, cancer treatment vaccines, and cytokine therapies

>Substances with established clinical safety profiles are used as coating agents (enabling rapid clinical trials)

>Published online in ACS Nano: http://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6c08403

- KAIST, Sungkyunkwan University, and CHA University develop a patient-specific blood-brain tumor barrier-on-a-chip model to predict individual responses to glioblastoma therapies

- On-chip drug responses closely match patients’ clinical treatment courses, highlighting the model’s potential as a platform for personalized treatment selection and anticancer drug development

Results from the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology’s Phase II RadiCaL trial (Alliance A031801), the first randomized study of a radiopharmaceutical in kidney cancer, found that adding radium-223 to the standard of care does not improve the length of time patients went without serious bone complications (called skeletal event-free survival) for patients with advanced kidney cancer. The findings are published open access in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.