Immunotherapies have transformed cancer treatment by helping the immune system recognize and attack tumors. They work for only about 20% of patients, though, and doctors still struggle to predict who will benefit.

 

A Rutgers Cancer Institute study in Cell Reports Medicine promises help with both those problems. It identifies a protein that appears to predict drug response, and it shows that pairing immunotherapy with a second type of drug dramatically improves survival in mice.

As lung cancer screening identifies an estimated 1.6 million suspicious lung nodules each year in the U.S. alone, physicians face a challenge. Most peripheral pulmonary lesions are benign, yet the malignant minority represent the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women. Robotic bronchoscopy may provide a less invasive and more precise approach to diagnosing lung cancer, suggests a five-year, multisite Mayo Clinic study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A new scientific study, published in Nature Health, reveals a strong link between exposure to agricultural pesticides in the environment and the risk of developing cancer. By combining environmental data, a nationwide cancer registry, and biological analyses, researchers from the IRD, the Institut Pasteur, the University of Toulouse, and the National Institute of Neoplastic Diseases (INEN) in Peru have shed new light on the role of pesticide exposure in the development of certain cancers.

How can cancer cells be targeted without damaging healthy tissue? This is one of the major challenges facing oncology today. Using  synthetic DNA strands, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has created a “smart” system that can recognise cancer cells with exceptional precision and release powerful drugs only where they are needed. Beyond cancer treatment, this research paves the way to “smart” medicines and programmable drug delivery. The full article can be discovered  in the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Damaging variants in genes involved in a rapid immune response (innate immunity) are significantly linked to earlier breast cancer onset in carriers of the harmful BRCA1 genetic mutation, reveal preliminary findings published online in the Journal of Medical Genetics.

Emerging evidence supports a relationship between chronic kidney disease and oral diseases, according to a recent review from University of Cincinnati College of Medicine researchers published in BMC Nephrology.