It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough.

When patients in the UK started showing adverse side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back through the data and worked with patient samples to see what went wrong.

Their findings, published recently in Nature, provide critical clues to why many immunotherapies trigger dangerous side effects—and point to a better strategy for treating patients with solid tumors.

A UK study has discovered five types of bacteria linked to aggressive prostate cancer. The breakthrough could help doctors identify who needs urgent treatment.

Every year, around 12,000 men in the UK die from prostate cancer, but many more die with prostate cancer than from it. So knowing whether the disease is going to advance rapidly or not is important for knowing who to treat.

Our latest study, published in European Urology Oncology, sheds some light on understanding which cancers will progress rapidly and aggressively and which won’t. Part of the answer lies with five types of bacteria.

For some years, we have known that pathogens (bacteria and viruses) can cause cancer. We know, for example, that Helicobacter pylori is associated with stomach cancer and that the human papillomavirus (HPV) can cause cervical cancer. There is also growing evidence that the bacteria Fusobacterium nucleatum is associated with colorectal cancer.

At the Max Rady College of Medicine, University of Manitoba, in Canada, researchers have developed a stem-cell-based therapy that is regenerating spinal cords in laboratory animals and may become available for human clinical trials.

Blocking inhibitory molecules that cause neuronal cells to degenerate, and inhibit stem cell transplants may prove a breakthrough therapy.

High-amplitude ultrasound pulses have been used to partially destroy liver tumors in rats, triggering the rodents’ immune systems to clear the remaining cancerous cells and prevent the disease from spreading or returning. Presenting their findings in the journal Cancers, the researchers behind this breakthrough say their technique could lead to effective, non-invasive treatments for some of the most intractable cancers in human patients.

Liver cancer certainly falls into that category, and is associated with a five-year survival rate of just 18 percent in the US. Though many treatment options are available, liver tumors have a tendency to metastasize or recur after these interventions.

In their study, the authors explain that conventional cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and thermal ablation are effective at destroying tumors, yet also trigger a somewhat unpredictable immune reaction which can be anti-tumor or pro-tumor. Furthermore, they note that the size, location, and stage of a tumor can sometimes make it impossible to target the entire tissue mass with existing treatments.