Owen Witte awarded international Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 4-May-2025 01:09 ET (4-May-2025 05:09 GMT/UTC)
The new approach establishes an opportunity to harness the success of immunotherapies that revolutionized the treatment of childhood leukemias for childhood brain cancers.
A grant from the American Cancer Society will allow researchers to develop a comprehensive picture of the factors that may contribute to increased cancer risk in some neighborhoods.
For the first time, scientists have systematically analysed somatic mutations in stomach lining tissue to unpick mutational processes, some of which can lead to cancer. The team also uncovered hints of a potential new cause of stomach cancer that needs further research.
The study, published in the prestigious journal EMBO Journal, reveals why some tumors escape the immune system, and offers a method to visualize these processes in complex biological models.
Our cells harbour a DNA detector termed cGAS to inform the immune system of viral and bacterial infections, cell death, as well as transformation during cancer. Researchers led by the Ikerbasque Research Professor Sergio P. Acebrón (University of the Basque Country and Heidelberg University) bioengineered this conserved cellular process into a novel fluorescent biosensor. The study, published in the flagship EMBO Journal, provides a multi-use biomedical tool to visualize the innate immune response to aberrant DNA across cell populations.