After a heart attack, cardiologists can reopen blocked vessels and restore blood flow, but the muscle cells that died will never be replaced. “The heart is one of the organs with the least ability to regenerate,” said Ke Cheng, Alan L. Kaganov Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia Engineering. “The spontaneous regeneration power is very, very limited.” In … Read more
A genetic mutation that helps animals like yaks and Tibetan antelopes survive at high altitudes may hold the key to repairing nerve damage in conditions such as cerebral paralysis and multiple sclerosis (MS). The finding, publishing March 13 in the Cell Press journal Neuron, reveals a naturally existing pathway that promotes regeneration after nerve damage and could open new doors for treating diseases like MS by leveraging molecules that are already present in the human body. … Read more
Clinically available KRAS inhibitors mainly target G12C, which is rare in PDAC and often acquires resistance. Oncogenic KRAS inactivates RB1 via CDK4/6, while RB1 mutation is rare. Thus, CDK4/6 inhibition offers an indirect strategy to counter KRAS-driven malignancy without direct KRAS targeting. Virtually all pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDACs) are initiated by activating mutations in the … Read more
Cancer is caused by faulty genes, but what also shapes a cancer cell’s behaviour is how a gene’s instructions are trimmed and rearranged before they are turned into the proteins that keep a cell alive. A study published in Nature Communications reveals a new way of measuring that editing process, known as splicing, directly. It … Read more
A new preclinical study in mice shows that precancerous cells in the pancreas can be eliminated before they have the chance to become tumors. Using an experimental therapy to target microscopic precancerous lesions in the pancreas nearly doubled survival in mouse models of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) compared to the same treatment given after cancer … Read more
Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, best known as the delivery vehicle for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines received by billions of people, are now at the center of a much larger medical revolution. Researchers are racing to use them to ferry therapeutic mRNA into cells for cancer therapies and treatments for inflammatory diseases, as well as delivering … Read more
In a randomized clinical trial of older adults, researchers found that taking multivitamins for two years modestly slowed epigenetic markers of aging — equivalent to roughly four months less biological aging compared with a placebo. Li et al. evaluated the two-year effect of daily multivitamin-multimineral supplements and cocoa extract (500 mg cocoa flavanols per day, including … Read more
Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease（MASLD） is characterized by excessive accumulation of lipids in hepatocytes and is closely associated with the rapid rise in insulin resistance, obesity, and diabetes prevalence, making it one of the most common chronic liver diseases worldwide. Fatty liver can lead to systemic metabolic dysfunction and further progress to steatohepatitis, hepatic fibrosis, … Read more
Researchers have discovered that mutations in the FOXJ3 gene act as a “master switch” failure, disrupting how the brain builds its layers and leading to FCD, a primary cause of drug-resistant epilepsy. The study reveals how FOXJ3 controls the formation of brain cortical layers during brain development by regulating the PTEN–mTOR signaling pathway. The PTEN-mTOR … Read more
Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have made an important discovery about how genetic mutations in breast cancer patients can interact and drive resistance to certain drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors. This finding, published in Nature, suggests a new strategy for predicting and preventing resistance to specific therapies based on the tumor’s genetic profile. This represents … Read more