Heterogeneity, in both tumors and their microenvironment, limits the success of current cancer treatments. But it also provides opportunities. Heterogeneities “are not barriers to therapy, they are vulnerabilities to be exploited,” was how David DeNardo described his take at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) on Sunday.
Researchers have gained new insights into physiological mechanisms that protect against blood clotting in immobilized individuals by studying animals that stay immobile for a good chunk of the year at a time: hibernating bears. “As a clinician, if you think about immobility, you always think about thrombosis,” Tobias Petzold told BioWorld. But his team’s work, which was published in the April 13, 2023, issue of Science, demonstrated that “immobility can trigger antithrombotic mechanisms.”
Helicobacter pylori infection and germline genetic variants interacted with each other to affect the risk of gastric cancer in a study comparing more than 11,000 patients with stomach cancer and 44,000 people without cancer. Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) published those findings in the March 30, 2023, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
If its challenges can be overcome, radioligand therapy is poised to change the way many cancers are treated. It is also likely to become an example of how scientific advances, once they are translated successfully, can enable further insights in a bench-to-bedside-to-bench loop. David Piwnica-Worms, professor and chair of cancer systems imaging at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, predicted that as radioligand therapy expands, many questions will be answered about both radiation biology and the interaction of radiation with the immune system more specifically.
By using a statin to preferentially increase the expression of HER2 on tumor cells, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering were able to sensitize gastric cancers to a HER2-targeted radioligand in animal models of gastric cancer. Lovastatin aided the radioligand via two distinct mechanisms. First, it increased the availability of HER2 on the cell surface, allowing greater binding. It also had radioprotective effects on normal cells, reducing the toxicity of higher doses of radiation.
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have developed allosteric modulators of the opioid receptor that were superior to the opioid antidote naloxone at blocking the effects of fentanyl in vitro. They presented their work in a session on “Progress towards more efficacious medicine: Antibiotics and antidotes” at the 2023 spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Restoring levels of the immune modulator mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor (MANF) in the muscles of aged animals improved their regenerative capacity by promoting repair-associated injury responses, researchers from the University of Lisbon have discovered.
Body mass index (BMI), which is calculated from height and weight, and its relationship to health is a hotly debated area of health. On the one hand, “it’s cheap, it’s intuitive, it’s noninvasive and easy to calculate,” Noa Rappaport told BioWorld. “But it misses a lot.” In the March 20, 2023, online issue of Nature Medicine, Rappaport’s group describes an alternative measure, which they have termed the biological BMI, that “better reflects metabolic health than traditional BMI,” said Rappaport, who is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology and the paper’s corresponding author.
Gut bacteria used liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) to organize themselves into condensates, which allowed them to adapt to nutrient deprivation, enabling them to colonize the gut. In experiments reported in the March 17, 2023, issue of Science, investigators showed that a mutant of the beneficial gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron was “highly defective in competitiveness, in its ability to colonize the mammalian gut,” senior author Eduardo Groisman told BioWorld. “Our paper provides the first example in which [LLPS] matters in bacterial host interactions.”
By adapting computational methods for dealing with large volumes of data, and slimming down that data, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered previously unknown genetic associations with 19 rare diseases, and validated three of those associations.
