A team led by researchers at the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research division of New York’s Northwell Health, developed a long-term implant model for vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) in mice that enables study of bioelectronics in chronic disease. The research was published in Elife, with a full description of the surgical technique and methods for calibrating the stimulation dose to enable other labs to use the methods to advance bioelectronic medicine.

Organoids cultured from patient-derived colorectal cancer cells have been used to demonstrate for the first time that tumors which have developed resistance to the full range of existing treatments, across chemotherapies, targeted therapies and immunotherapies, retain a requirement for Werner helicase (WRN) for survival. WRN has a key role in the maintenance of genome stability, but although loss of WRN is known to initiate synthetic lethality in DNA mismatch repair deficient colorectal cancer, studies into the effect of inhibiting that helicase have to date been limited to a handful of cell lines.