Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered that specialized immune cells within the glioblastoma tumor metabolize fructose to suppress immune responses and promote tumor growth, reports a study published on March 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, the first to identify this sugar pathway as a driver of immune suppression in brain tumors, suggests that blocking fructose metabolism in the specialized cells may improve immunotherapy response and patient outcomes.

Chimeric antigen receptor-invariant natural killer T cells, or CAR-iNKT cells, have shown promise in early studies, particularly against solid tumors that traditional CAR-T therapy struggles to treat. However, these cells often lose potency after delivery to a patient’s body. The UCLA team developed a system that functions like a charging station for these immune cells. Once implanted near a tumor, it attracts CAR-iNKT cells that have been engineered to recognize cancer. In the preclinical study, the platform demonstrated promising biocompatibility. The team is continuing to refine the system and explore how it could support additional cancer immunotherapies.

Cancer drugs can accumulate in hidden “storage hubs” inside tumour cells, creating uneven drug exposure across tumours, according to new research from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) and Imperial College London. This means some cancer cells receive much higher drug doses than others, which could help explain why treatments work well for some patients but not others, and may open avenues towards more personalised approaches to cancer therapy in the future.

In a single experiment, scientists can decipher the entire genomes of many patient samples, animal models or cultured cells. To fully realize the potential to study biology at this unprecedented scale, researchers must be equipped to analyze the titanic troves of data generated by these new methods.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and the University of California Los Angeles published findings March 17, 2026, in Cell Reports Methods discussing building and testing a new computational tool for tackling massive and complex sequencing datasets. The new resource, named metapipeline-DNA, may also make sequencing data analysis more standardized across different research labs.

Los Angeles, CA — March 17, 2026 — The Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) is proud to announce that Principal Investigator Dr. Aliesha O’Raw, Co-Founder of OnVagus, has been selected for the 2026 American Cancer Society (ACS) BrightEdge Entrepreneurs (BEE) Program cohort. The BrightEdge Entrepreneurs Program is a competitive program for startups in the cancer diagnostic and therapeutic space, providing mentorship and entrepreneur training alongside early-stage investment support, including a $100,000 SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) backed by ACS’ BrightEdge Investment Fund.