GoKawiil
Tech News
AstraZeneca has agreed to invest $2 billion in Summit Therapeutics as part of an expanded partnership to develop cancer treatments. Summit's shares jumped in after-hours trading following the announcement.
A Boston Consulting Group analysis found that of 140 in vivo CAR-T-cell drugs currently being tested in animals or humans worldwide, 82% originate from Chinese developers, even though most early preclinical research came from the US and Germany. Researchers note China has moved unusually fast in pushing these therapies into clinical trials, with early results from at least one human trial for an autoimmune condition described as promising.
Renier Brentjens, one of the early researchers behind CAR T cell therapy, is now developing a new generation of engineered 'living drug' treatments. His current work aims to extend the success these therapies have had against blood cancers to solid tumors, which have proven far harder to treat with cell-based approaches.
Researchers studied how cancer cells repair DNA breaks that occur at TA-repeat sequences within extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), circular fragments that often carry amplified oncogenes like MYC. Using cell lines including COLO320DM, HeLa-derived clones and engineered mouse neural stem cells, the team found that a repair mechanism called microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ) helps preserve these ecDNA elements and the growth advantage they give cancer cells.
Researchers analyzing human liver tissue from pancreatic cancer patients, alongside mouse models, report that hepatocytes supply the amino acid serine to metastasizing pancreatic cancer cells, supporting their growth in the liver. The work, which included tissue from the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Rapid Autopsy Program, used immunohistochemistry to examine markers including PHGDH, albumin, CK19, Ki67 and FOXO3A in liver samples.
A blog post recounts Warren Zevon's October 2002 appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, made while Zevon was living with terminal cancer. The writer highlights Zevon's remark to Letterman about needing to 'enjoy every sandwich' and describes rediscovering the clip years later via a YouTube recommendation while eating a sandwich during a travel layover.
Biochemist Anna Pertl at the Whitehead Institute prompted an AI system called Co-Scientist to generate novel strategies for disrupting molecular condensates that fuel the cancer-driving protein MYC. Unlike a simple chatbot, the tool deploys multiple autonomous agents that search literature, debate competing explanations, and iteratively refine hypotheses before returning results, a process that can take hours. The work builds on prior findings by her supervisor Richard Young, whose lab showed cancer cells hijack condensates at super-enhancers to overproduce MYC, research now being pursued commercially through his company Dewpoint Therapeutics.
Researchers report that a young boy's cancer went into remission after receiving an experimental form of CAR T cell therapy. The treatment is part of ongoing efforts to adapt CAR T technology, previously effective mainly against blood cancers, to target solid tumors.
Researchers led by Stanford computer scientist James Zou built a system called Virtual Biotech, using up to 37,000 AI agents modeled like departments of a biotech company, overseen by a 'chief scientific officer' agent. After analyzing thousands of past clinical trials, the AI swarm flagged an immune-dampening protein as a target and, with human guidance, proposed a candidate treatment for lung cancer, detailed in a new Science paper.
Nature has published an author correction to a 2017 paper on genomic deletion of malic enzyme 2 (ME2) in pancreatic cancer, fixing several figure mistakes made during assembly. These include a duplicated AMPKα immunoblot image, an incorrect β-actin loading-control blot, and a mislabelled timepoint in bioluminescence imaging data.
A young boy with hepatoblastoma that had spread to his lungs and stopped responding to chemotherapy achieved complete remission after receiving an experimental CAR-T cell treatment. The therapy, part of the CARE study, engineered the patient's own immune cells to target glypican-3, a protein found on liver cancer cells, while also boosting the cells' potency with two added immune signaling proteins. Twelve months after treatment, doctors report no detectable trace of the cancer.
University of Adelaide scientists led by Chunxia Zhao designed 'smart' nanoparticles that ferry mRNA specifically to tumor-associated macrophages, prompting them to produce CXCL9, a molecule that summons T cells to attack cancer. The approach, described this week in Science Advances, aims to reverse how tumors normally hijack macrophages to block immune attacks.