An international research team led by scientists from the Museum of Natural Sciences in Barcelona, the  Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, has discovered that the fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) is biofluorescent. Their work, published in Royal Society Open Science, reveals that this iconic species emits turquoise light when exposed to ultraviolet radiation. This phenomenon had gone unnoticed despite decades of study.

Preclinical studies at the Salk Institute laid the foundation for a question now being tested in patients: Can a vitamin D-based therapy “reprogram” a pancreatic tumor’s protective microenvironment, making tumors more vulnerable to therapeutic treatments? A clinical trial led by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute now demonstrates that a synthetic vitamin D analog can be administered safely in combination with standard-of-care chemotherapy and effectively reprogram the supporting pancreatic tumor microenvironment. This work also provides early evidence that vitamin D analogs can enhance chemotherapy response and improve survival, especially in patients with high tumor vitamin D receptor expression.