Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype characterized by limited targeted treatment options, a high propensity for distant metastasis and variable responses to immune checkpoint blockade. Increasing evidence indicates that the tumor microbiome can influence cancer progression and therapeutic responses, yet the mechanisms through which intratumoral bacteria reshape the TNBC microenvironment remain poorly understood. Fusobacterium nucleatum, a Gram-negative anaerobic bacterium associated with several cancers, has been detected in breast tumors and linked to metastatic progression, but its contribution to metabolic and immune regulation in TNBC has remained unclear.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Julia Zeitlinger, Ph.D., and her team partnered with Google DeepMind on AlphaGenome Atlas, a new AI-generated resource released today that predicts the molecular effects of more than 9 billion possible single-letter DNA changes across the human genome. Zeitlinger's lab used the Atlas to map regulatory motifs — the short DNA sequences that help determine which genes are turned on and off — at base-pair resolution across hundreds of cell types, work that would be impractical to do experimentally. The one-petabyte resource is searchable through a web browser without writing code, allowing researchers to prioritize which genetic variants and biological mechanisms to investigate first. Researchers from Google DeepMind, Stowers, Broad Institute, the University of Exeter, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Stanford University contributed scientific input and tested applications of the resource.

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have uncovered a possible reason why metastatic medullary thyroid cancer  causes abnormal bone growth, pointing to a new opportunity to detect and monitor bone metastases in patients.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed an AI tool that rapidly and successfully measures colonoscopy quality by reviewing footage of the procedure.

UCLA researchers have developed a way to mass-produce cancer-fighting T cells from blood stem cells found in cord blood, engineered to target a protein found in many solid tumors — creating uniform batches instead of custom treatments for each patient.