Prostate cancer affects one in five Australian men, making it the most common cancer in the country. Now, researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have produced the world’s most detailed cellular ‘atlas’ of early-stage prostate cancer, revealing the earliest changes that lead to the disease.

Gladstone Institutes, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, has secured more than 105,000 square feet of future laboratory space in a newly constructed building at 1450 Owens Street in San Francisco, empowering its scientists with the tools and environment to create medicines of the future. The new building is one block from Gladstone's 200,000-square-foot headquarters, which houses more than 600 scientists across 32 labs. 

Acetylcholine, dopamine, noradrenaline, and γ-aminobutyric acid have long been considered exclusive messengers of the nervous system. But a growing number of evidence challenges this traditional view, revealing that immune cells also speak this neural language. A comprehensive review published by the team of Professor Liwei Lu and Dr. Fan Xiao at the University of Hong Kong systematically summarizes the emerging field of immune cell-derived neurotransmitters, illuminating their roles in immunity and disease.

Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC are receiving up to $6.8 million for a two-year research project to develop new computational models and support tools that could accelerate access to cell and gene therapies for children with rare diseases. The team will develop a new framework that combines detailed data about the biological features of each therapy and how patients respond to them. By using artificial intelligence (AI) to study these connections, the project aims to better understand how specific features of a therapy relate to patient outcomes. The research is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) UNIfying Cell Therapy Outcome prediction and Regulatory Navigation (UNICORN) project, led by ARPA-H Program Manager Daria Fedyukina, Ph.D. UNICORN combines advanced cell analysis technology developed by the team with machine learning tools to identify biological patterns and therapy product features linked to treatment response. This approach aims to enable the development of a regulatory decision-support tool that guides interpretation of product-related evidence when limited data makes conventional measures difficult to establish, enabling patients and families to access new treatments sooner.

A team from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has discovered a novel way in which tumor cells alter the brain to establish themselves and spread cancer. They also demonstrate that a drug that prevents this process already exists and is approved for other indications. The finding is published in the journal ‘Cancer Research’.