A research team led by the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) with members from Duke-NUS Medical School, KK Women and Children’s Hospital, A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), the University of Southampton and the Alan Turing Institute, has discovered how cancer evades the immune system and metastasises in the body, and explores how to shut down this dangerous feature.

Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) has become a promising immunotherapy tool to help treat advanced melanoma. The therapy, which harnesses immune cells collected from the patient’s own tumors, could provide a new treatment option to cancer patients, potentially bypassing radiation therapies and harsh chemotherapy drugs.

Glioblastoma is the most common type of brain tumor in adults. The disease is 100% fatal and there are no cures, making it the most aggressive type of cancer. Such a poor prognosis has motivated researchers and neurosurgeons to understand the biology of tumors with the goal of creating better therapies.

CycPeptMPDB, a novel database - created by Tokyo Tech researchers - focused on the membrane permeability of cyclic peptides, could accelerate the development of drugs based on these promising compounds. This database was created by gathering published information on thousands of cyclic peptides and organizing it neatly in an online-accessible platform.

How to determine the most effective treatment for colon cancer? The response to chemotherapy varies greatly from one patient to another. A team from the UNIGE has developed a new method for testing different drugs, without going through the affected person’s body and without resorting to animal experiments. The researchers used organoids - miniature reproductions of organs and tissues - derived from patients and exposed to treatments.

A new artificial intelligence tool can predict the functions of enzymes based on their amino acid sequences, even when the enzymes are unstudied or poorly understood. The researchers said the AI tool, dubbed CLEAN, outperforms the leading state-of-the-art tools in accuracy, reliability and sensitivity. Better understanding of enzymes and their functions would be a boon for research in genomics, chemistry, industrial materials, medicine, pharmaceuticals and more.

Malignant melanoma is a relatively aggressive type of skin cancer. When detected early, it is usually treatable by surgical resection only, but metastases develop often spreading to distant areas. Currently, tumor thickness and the presence of ulceration are some of the known prognostic factors used as indicators of malignant melanoma. Therefore, the discovery of valuable markers to assess the malignant potential of melanoma more accurately may be necessary to develop appropriate treatments.