Brest cancer is the most common cancer in women. Among breast tumors that spread to other organs (develop metastasis), 70% belong to a variant, called luminal, whose cells are sensitive to the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone. In fact, the tumor forms when these hormones order the cells to divide. The usual treatment for advanced cases is surgery, followed by hormone therapy, alone or in combination with chemotherapy or targeted therapy.

While pembrolizumab is an approved treatment for patients with stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), only some patients respond to this therapy. Treatment failure, researchers say, is often caused by differences in the tumor microenvironment. An ongoing phase II study (KEYNOTE-495/KeyImPaCT) led by a researcher at Yale Cancer Center reveals that combining pembrolizumab with other treatments reduced the size of target tumors, resulting in a higher response rate for patients with advanced NSCLC.

In a world-first clinical trial published in the journal Nature Medicine, a multi-centre study from Lawson Health Research Institute, the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) and the Jewish General Hospital (JGH) has found fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) from healthy donors are safe and show promise in improving response to immunotherapy in patients with advanced melanoma.

New insights explaining why some children have a longer remission than others after having cutting-edge CAR T-cell therapy for leukaemia have been revealed by researchers at UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

The collaborative research project, published in Nature Medicine, combines expertise in novel immune therapy design and state-of-the-art computational analysis to identify a genetic signature of CAR T-cells that will be the most effective in the long term.

"Listen, if there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us is that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but... life finds a way," said Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, the 1993 science fiction film about a park with living dinosaurs.

Artificial intelligence can predict on- and off-target activity of CRISPR tools that target RNA instead of DNA, according to new research published in Nature Biotechnology.

The study by researchers at New York University, Columbia Engineering, and the New York Genome Center, combines a deep learning model with CRISPR screens to control the expression of human genes in different ways - such as flicking a light switch to shut them off completely or by using a dimmer knob to partially turn down their activity.

A team of researchers led by Dr. Marcus Conrad from Helmholtz Munich discovered a novel anti-cancer drug, called icFSP1, which sensitizes cancer cells to ferroptosis. Ferroptosis is characterized by the iron-dependent oxidative destruction of cellular membranes, which is counteracted by ferroptosis suppressor protein-1 (FSP1), one of the guardians of ferroptosis. Although FSP1 has been considered as an attractive drug target for cancer therapy, in vivo efficacious FSP1 inhibitors have been lacking.