Blocking poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) will selectively kill tumor cells with some types of DNA repair deficiencies, a vulnerability known as synthetic lethality.

A lot of effort has been expended on understanding what determines the efficacy of checkpoint blockade. Much of that effort has been focused on the tumor and the immune system – reasonably enough, since those are the direct combatants in the tumor-immune face-off.

In oncology, there is a saying that "the tissue is the issue," meaning that to determine the best way to deal with a tumor, you need to biopsy it – and that such biopsies can be difficult to obtain.

Mice lacking the PD-1 receptor, which shuts off T cells, affected behavior by altering amino acid levels. Researchers from the Japanese Riken Institute looked into the metabolic effects of unchecked T cells, and showed that T cells that lacked PD-1 accumulated amino acids due to their increased metabolism, including tryptophan and tyrosine, both of which are precursors for neurotransmitter synthesis.

Two separate papers reported advances in nucleic acid editing today that further expand the read of such editing, which has already been transformed since the onset of CRISPR in ways that are only beginning to be understood, and exploited.

The BRCA genes were first discovered for their roles in gynecological cancers, with the most deleterious mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 raising a woman’s lifetime risk of breast or ovarian cancer from 7 percent to somewhere between 45 and 65 percent.

Calcium flux into neurons is a key event in memory formation as well as neuronal signaling more generally, and calcium levels in neurons are tightly regulated by calcium binding proteins.