Background: Although immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have revolutionized liver cancer treatment, some patients experience early tumor progression after therapy, missing the window for other potential treatments, such as neoadjuvant therapy. Therefore, identifying the predictive factors for early progression is critical for timely therapeutic adjustment and the optimization of patient outcomes. Methods: This retrospective study enrolled patients with liver cancer who received their first ICI combined with targeted therapy at the Fifth Medical Center of the PLA General Hospital between June 2022 and December 2023. Early tumor progression was defined as tumor progression within 6 months of therapy initiation.

Scientists at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) have discovered a key mechanism that makes prostate cancer cells resistant to the latest drugs used to treat them. Their findings, reported in the current issue of Nature, solve a longstanding puzzle in tumor biology and present preclinical data on a drug compound that could soon enter the clinic.

The work grew out of decades of prostate cancer research by Michael Shen, Ph.D., co-leader of the Tumor Biology and Microenvironment research program at the HICCC. Shen’s research focuses on lineage plasticity, the ability of cancer cells to reprogram themselves to impersonate other types of cells.

“Plasticity is a hallmark of cancer in general and a very important feature of advanced prostate cancer, particularly when it comes to the emergence of treatment resistance,” says Shen. Treatment with androgen receptor inhibitors, which have become the standard of care in recent years, often stimulate prostate tumor cells to adopt neuroendocrine characteristics, rendering them resistant to the drugs.

SereNeuro Therapeutics, a preclinical biotechnology company developing non-opioid pain therapies, has unveiled new data on a novel approach to chronic pain management and joint tissue preservation. The data highlight SN101, a first-in-class induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived therapy.

The announcement was made at the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Symposium Accelerating PSC-Derived Cell Therapies: Starting with the End in Mind.

Tanning bed users have more melanomas in uncommonly diagnosed areas, according to new research.

The mutation burden of melanocytes in tanning bed users was nearly twofold that of melanocytes from control donors [median mutations per megabase (mut/Mb) of 5.69 versus 2.86] (Fig. 2B). This trend remained significant when we separately compared melanocytes by anatomic site (median mut/Mb of 8.82 versus 4.60 in upper back and 5.19 versus 2.05 in lower back) (Fig. 2C). The mutation burdens of cells from both control groups were less than the cells in the tanning cohort (fig. S2A).

We developed a linear mixed-effects (LME) model to determine whether tanning bed users had higher mutation burdens after adjusting for anatomic site and outliers (18). Specifically, we compared the tanning and control cohorts at the cell level while introducing a variable for anatomic site and including a random effect for different donors (fig. S3). In this analysis, the cells from tanning bed users had a significantly higher mutation burden (P = 1.3 × 10⁻²). However, we noted that cells from one donor (donor 59) had an extremely high mutation burden. To ensure that this donor was not entirely responsible for the differences observed, the analyses were repeated with a robust linear mixed-effects (RLME) model, which is less sensitive to outliers, heavy-tailed distributions, and model violations (19). In this analysis, the cells from tanning bed users continued to have a significantly higher mutation burden (P = 6.1 × 10⁻⁵).

We also compared mutation burdens at the biopsy level. We defined the mutation burden of a biopsy as the median mutation burden of its constituent melanocytes. Our statistical power was more limited in these comparisons because there were fewer independent biopsies than individual cells. On the lower back, tanning bed biopsies had significantly higher mutation burdens than control biopsies (Fig. 2D and fig. S2B). The difference was not statistically significant on the upper back (Fig. 2E and fig. S2C), although cell-level differences were significant at this site (Fig. 2C). The upper back is the most common site of sunburn (20) and melanoma (21), indicating that natural sunlight can induce high mutation burdens at this site, even without the additional influence of tanning beds. Since tanning bed–induced mutations would be expected to contribute to a smaller proportion of mutations in the underlying skin cells from the upper back, we would need a larger sample size to detect a statistically significant difference at the biopsy level.