When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what’s clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.

The artistic masterpiece above, reminiscent of a stained glass window, is the work of Michael Angelo—no, not the famous 16th Century Italian artist, but a 21st Century physician-scientist who’s out to develop a better way of looking at what’s going on inside solid tumors. Called multiplexed ion beam imaging (MIBI), Angelo’s experimental method may someday give clinicians the power to analyze up to 100 different proteins in a single tumor sample.

In this image, Angelo used MIBI to analyze a human breast tumor sample for nine proteins simultaneously—each protein stained with an antibody tagged with a metal reporter. Six of the nine proteins are illustrated here. The subpopulation of cells that are positive for three proteins often used to guide breast cancer treatment (estrogen receptor a, progesterone receptor, Ki-67) have yellow nuclei, while aqua marks the nuclei of another group of cells that’s positive for only two of the proteins (estrogen receptor a, progesterone receptor). In the membrane and cytoplasmic regions of the cell, red indicates actin, blue indicates vimentin, which is a protein associated with highly aggressive tumors, and the green is E-cadherin, which is expressed at lower levels in rapidly growing tumors than in less aggressive ones.

What do people see when they die? New research finds what people can recall after surviving a cardiac arrest.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists reversed an aggressive cancer, reverting malignant cells towards a more normal state. Rhabdoid tumors are an aggressive cancer which is missing a key tumor suppressor protein. Findings showed that with the missing tumor suppressor, deleting or degrading the quality control protein DCAF5 reversed the cancer cell state. These results suggest a new approach to curing cancer — returning cancerous cells to an earlier, more normal state rather than killing cancer cells with toxic therapies — may be possible. The results were published today in Nature.

“Rather than making a toxic event that kills rhabdoid cancer, we were able to reverse the cancer state by returning the cells toward normal,” said senior author Charles W.M. Roberts, MD, PhD, Executive Vice President and St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center director. “This approach would be ideal, especially if this paradigm could also be applied to other cancers.”

“We found a dependency which actually reverses the cancer state,” said first author Sandi Radko-Juettner, PhD, a former St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences student, now a Research Program Manager for the Hematological Malignancies Program at St. Jude. “Standard cancer therapies work by causing toxicities that also damage healthy cells in the body. Here, it appears that we’re instead fixing the problem caused by the loss of a tumor suppressor in this rhabdoid cancer.”