A revolutionary quantum sensing project that could transform cancer treatment by tracking how immune cells interact with tumours has been awarded a prestigious £2 million Future Leaders Fellowship.

The four-year fellowship, funded by UK Research and Innovation, focuses on a critical problem: immune cells often fail when they encounter cancer tissue because the tumour environment disrupts their metabolism. The pathbreaking project could enable the development of improved patient-tailored cancer therapies and provide tools for earlier diagnosis and evaluation of anti-cancer drugs.

If mistletoe’s status as a nutrient-stealing freeloader has been cooling your holiday ardor, new research led by an Oregon State University scientist may help relight the fire.

Scientists have outlined an approach for interpreting how materials interact with polarized light, which could benefit biomedical imaging and advanced material design. Using an elliptical model to analyze how phase-shifting elements interact with polarized light, they offer an alternative, more physically plausible way to interpret polarization data from complex materials. Conventional methods usually assume that a material’s retarder properties can be represented as a two-layer model combining a circular and a linear retarder, which often leads to errors when the internal structure is unknown or highly layered. The elliptical model adopted by the authors captures a material’s full retarder properties with three parameters—elliptical axis orientation, degree of ellipticity, and elliptical retardance—without requiring assumptions about its internal structure. Tests on liquid crystal samples, including layered and nonlayered configurations, showed that this model avoids misinterpretations common with conventional models.

Engineered oncolytic bacteria have emerged as a promising therapeutic platform for precision cancer treatment, offering tumor-specific colonization, immune activation, and controllable therapeutic delivery. This review summarizes recent advances in the design and application of synthetic biological strategies that enhance bacterial precision, safety, and efficacy in tumor therapy. These strategies are categorized into three major regulatory modes: exogenous input–responsive gene circuits, autonomous bacterial signal–responsive gene circuits, and tumor microenvironment-responsive gene circuits.