Separate teams discovered the same target in solid cancers, enabling a powerful two-pronged attack on both tumors and the cells shielding them.
Category: biotech/medical
New cancer drug shows promise in mesothelioma trial
Mesothelioma is a rare but aggressive cancer, usually caused by exposure to asbestos. Inhaled asbestos fibers become lodged in the lungs, causing inflammation that can lead to tumor formation decades later. Worldwide, about 30,000 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year.
Current treatments—immunotherapy and chemotherapy—offer limited benefit. Patients—often men who worked in shipbuilding, oil refining and asbestos manufacturing—face a median survival of approximately 12 months and a five-year survival rate of around 10%.
“It’s a disease of a significant unmet medical need,” says Brian Cunniff, a professor at the University of Vermont.
Signs of sugar detected near centre of the Milky Way
Astronomers have detected signs of a type of sugar in gas clouds near the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Sugars provide energy and are key building blocks of life on Earth, such as DNA, but how they got here is a mystery.
It is not uncommon to find sugar in the cosmos — simple sugars such as ribose and glucose have been previously discovered on asteroids in our Solar System.
Ultrasound-based pacemaker noninvasively steadies the heart
MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.
The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat.
In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions.
AI tool improves prediction of who will respond to cancer immunotherapy drugs
Cancer immunotherapy drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) can be miracle drugs for cancer patients, curing some and turning deadly disease into a manageable chronic condition in others. But these drugs work for only a subset of patients, with few indications why—a knowledge gap that has detrimental effects on patient prognosis, clinical trial recruitment and research that could lead to new therapies.
A new artificial intelligence model called COMPASS, developed by Harvard Medical School researchers and their colleagues, improves prediction of which patients are most likely to respond to ICIs. Using data from patients treated in the past, the model outperformed the best existing approaches by 8.5%. It makes its predictions based on patients’ tumor gene activity and provides a rationale for its output.
If these results are validated in a future clinical trial, COMPASS could lead to better personalized medicine for cancer patients, more efficient trial enrollment for new therapies and new drug targets for researchers to explore.
Solving a 30-year-old puzzle about a mysterious superconducting material
A material made from yttrium, barium and copper oxide (better known as YBCO) has intrigued scientists since its discovery in 1987, largely because it retains its superconductive properties at a higher-than-normal temperature. However, it is extremely brittle, which makes it tricky to put to practical use.
But researchers can still learn much from it. For instance, its unusual properties can provide insight into designing possible room-temperature superconductors —that is, materials that conduct electricity with no resistance at room temperature. Doing so would have a huge impact on power transmission, medical imaging and fusion reactor magnets.
One thing about YBCO that has mystified researchers is that doping it with praseodymium, a rare earth element, completely kills the material’s superconductive properties. That is unusual because adding other rare earth elements to YBCO does not have the same effect.
Study reports the first detection of a sugar in interstellar space
Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis of the first nucleic acids. Despite their importance, one of the major questions in origin-of-life research is how the first sugars formed on Earth, since laboratory experiments show that they do not form in sufficient quantities under prebiotic conditions.
Sugars such as ribose and glucose have previously been detected in meteorite and asteroid samples, suggesting that some of these molecules may have originated in the primordial molecular cloud from which our solar system formed. However, until now, no sugar had ever been directly detected in the interstellar medium.
AI-powered electronic nose can distinguish tens of thousands of odors
A research team has presented a roadmap for developing an “artificial olfactory system” that detects odors like the human nose and analyzes them using artificial intelligence (AI) by leveraging metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). The team systematically organized and reviewed key research trends in electronic nose technology, from MOF material design to sensor implementation and AI-based odor pattern recognition. The research was led by Hyuk-Jun Kwon’s in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science of Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology. The work is published in the journal Progress in Materials Science.
An artificial olfactory system, or “electronic nose (e-nose),” is a technology in which AI learns and analyzes signal patterns generated when multiple sensors respond to odor molecules. Although it has broad potential applications in areas such as food safety, environmental pollution monitoring, hazardous gas detection and disease diagnosis, conventional sensor materials have faced limitations in selectivity, response speed and operating conditions.
The research team focused on MOFs as a key material for overcoming these limitations. MOFs are porous materials formed by combining metal ions and organic compounds, and they can effectively adsorb odor molecules through their microscopic pores. Moreover, because their structures and chemical properties can be tailored for specific purposes, they are regarded as next-generation sensor materials capable of sensitively detecting various odors even under room-temperature, low-power operating conditions.
Atoms tell different stories when light hits a molecule in trillionths of a second
Researchers have captured how a molecule redistributes energy after absorbing light, differentiating the roles of individual atoms in the process. They used X-ray flashes from the European XFEL to show that different atoms in the same molecule can reveal different aspects of the process. The study provides evidence that excitation by light can enhance an atom’s sensitivity to the motion of nearby atoms. The new method for following ultrafast chemical reactions at the atomic scale, in real time, can help researchers understand photostability in DNA, energy flow in light-harvesting materials and other fundamental processes driven by light.
The team investigated 3-fluoropyridine, a small ring-shaped molecule. When the molecule absorbs light, such as a short pulse from an ultraviolet laser, it is promoted into an electronically excited state and rapidly distorts out of its original planar shape. It then passes through a so-called conical intersection: a short-lived but crucial crossing point where movements of electrons and the atoms’ cores become strongly coupled.
After this point, the molecule returns to the ground state. At that moment, electronic energy is converted into vibrations. The researchers found that this conversion leaves distinct fingerprints at different atomic sites: the fluorine atom acts as a clean marker of vibrational relaxation, while the nitrogen atom, which is more directly involved in the excitation, reflects an intertwined response of electron redistribution and structural motion.