CSHL Assistant Professor Semir Beyaz and colleagues have shown that transcription factor PPARD can promote the fitness of both cancer and immune cells. Their research could help make CAR T-cell therapy effective against colorectal cancer and lead to new treatment strategies for endometriosis, among other conditions.

What if the same particle beam could both destroy a tumor and reveal, in real time, where the treatment is actually reaching? A new mixed-beam approach combines carbon ions for therapy with helium ions for monitoring — and a new method now makes it possible to check the beam composition without interrupting it.

This review argues that the central obstacle to the clinical translation of RNA 5-methylcytosine (m5C) in cancer is measurement, not biological plausibility. Although m5C regulates RNA maturation, export, stability, translation and decay, and altered m5C pathways have been linked to tumor progression, immune regulation and resistance phenotypes, current platforms support non-equivalent claims. LC-MS/MS provides calibrated bulk quantification but destroys site information; conversion and deaminase chemistries resolve candidate nucleotides but remain background-limited and largely semiquantitative; antibody enrichment and writer trapping yield regions or enzyme-dependent substrates without native site fractions; nanopore calls are model- and context-dependent. These limitations are amplified near the noise floor in FFPE tissue, small biopsies, plasma and extracellular-vesicle RNA, where a missing signal is a no-call rather than an unmodified cytosine. The authors conclude that no platform is yet adequate as a standalone reportable assay. Translation requires an intended-use-specific measurand, matrix-matched controls, calibrated site fractions, locked wet-laboratory and bioinformatic procedures, explicit limits of blank, detection and quantification, followed by independent clinical validation and comparison with established tests. Biological heterogeneity, tumor attribution, incremental value, feasibility and clinical utility also require prospective evaluation in parallel.

In a new, paradigm-shifting study in ovaries from 28 women, scientists at Northwestern University and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging found in the decades well past menopause, the ovary remains biologically active and continues to remodel with age, showing increased inflammation and changes in tissue structure. The study also found a molecular link between ovarian aging and cancer.

“In the ovary, we reach a point of no return with respect to fertility in which it's no longer producing eggs, and I would venture to say most people assume those ovaries are just sitting there doing nothing, similar to the appendix,” said co-corresponding author Francesca Duncan, associate professor of reproductive science in medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “But that's what makes this study very different.” 

The findings challenge the notion that the ovary is an innocent bystander after reproduction ends, raising new questions about whether it could play a more active role in aging and chronic disease in women. 

In landmark single-cell study of pancreatic tumors, UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center researchers reveal how tumor evolution shapes disease, which could yield new, more effective treatments for one of the deadliest cancers.