Cancer

Immunotherapy, which uses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, is an effective treatment option, yet many patients do not respond to it. Thus, cancer researchers are seeking new ways to optimize immunotherapy so that it is more effective for more people. Now, Professors Susan Kaech and Gerald Shadel, co-first authors Kailash Chandra Mangalhara and Karthik Varanasi, and colleagues have found that manipulating an early step in energy production in mitochondria—the cell’s powerhouses—reduces melanoma tumor growth and enhances the immune response in mice. In the future, this manipulation of mitochondrial energy production may be leveraged to create new cancer therapeutics that are less harmful for mitochondria and cells.

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Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers—only about one in eight patients survives five years after diagnosis. Those dismal statistics are in part due to the thick, nearly impenetrable wall of fibrosis, or scar tissue, that surrounds most pancreatic tumors and makes it hard for drugs to access and destroy the cancer cells. Professor Ronald Evans, Senior Staff Scientists Michael Downes and Annette Atkins, first author Gaoyang Liang, and colleagues have now discovered how a class of anti-cancer drugs called HDAC inhibitors can help treat pancreatic cancer by modulating the activation of fibroblasts—the cells that make up that wall of scar tissue.

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