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.

Scientists have taken an important step forward in predicting who will develop Type 1 diabetes months before symptoms appear.

In a paper published online on June 29 in Cell Reports Medicine, researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their colleagues identify a set of altered proteins that predict a condition known as islet autoimmunity, a precursor for everyone who will ultimately develop Type 1 diabetes.

Diabetes is a progressive disease that affects one's ability to control blood sugar levels. For many patients, the condition becomes more severe over time and blood sugar levels grow more difficult to manage. Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, have granted patients more control in lowering of blood sugar.

Modern immunotherapies boost the body's own defenses against cancer. They activate killer T cells of the immune system that can specifically recognize and destroy cancer cells. In many patients, however, cancer cells adapt and become invisible to killer T cells so that the treatment is no longer effective. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Magdeburg has now discovered a new mechanism that enables the immune system to also eliminate such invisible cancer cells.