Cancer
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Merck and Moderna Say Their Melanoma Vaccine Worked, but Two Months On the Public Still Hasn't Seen by How Much
Merck and Moderna have announced only that their phase 3 met its endpoints. The smaller trial behind the excitement missed the conventional two-sided significance bar, and one bank has modeled a price as high as $475,000 per patient.
CancerCancer Wasting Was Hiding in Two Million Routine Weigh-Ins
At Memorial Sloan Kettering, 48.8% of 59,493 tumor-sequenced cancer patients had at least one cachectic weight-loss episode over about five years. No drug is approved for it, and a French hospital coded it in under 1% of its cancer patients.
CancerThe 80.5 Percent Headline, and the Three Confirmed Responses Behind It
Vividion led its colorectal announcement with an 80.5 percent disease-control rate. In that same group, three tumors shrank enough to count as a response.
CancerThe Inherited Lung Cancer Gene That Rode Out of Appalachia on a Wagon Road
Carriers were about 25 times as likely to develop lung cancer as everyone else, more than 60 times if they never smoked. The variant came over with British and Irish settlers, concentrated in Southern Appalachia after a founder event two centuries ago, and surfaced in a consumer spit-kit database, n
CancerA Scientist Chased One Missing Blood Marker for Twenty Years. The Answer Was a Tiny Gene Hiding in Plain Sight.
More than 99.9 percent of people carry a blood marker called AnWj. For most of the few who don't, the absence is acquired, a sign of an underlying blood disorder or cancer rather than something they were born with.
CancerA 34-Year Mammography Advocate Co-Wrote the Study That Shrinks Screening's Biggest Harm
Overdiagnosis, the risk that screening treats cancers that never would have killed you, was pegged as high as 50 percent. A reinterpretation of eight old trials now puts it under 5, with an author who has promoted screening for 34 years.
CancerThe Company Behind the CRISPR Leukemia Breakthrough Shut Itself Down a Year Before the Paper Ran
Thirty patients with aggressive blood cancers got a CRISPR-edited transplant that worked as designed. Vor Biopharma, the company that built it, had already laid off 95 percent of its staff and left the program behind.
CancerThe Compound That Outsmarts Cancer's Defenses: Eight Cell Lines, a Few Mice, and a Startup
Baylor researchers say CS18 dismantles the survival switch tumors use to resist treatment. It works in eight cell lines and a handful of mice, and its inventors just incorporated a company around it.
CancerThe Healing Cells That Cheat Death Carry a Catch: Their Offspring Are Seven Times Harder to Kill
A radiation-blasted fruit fly rebuilt half its ruined tissue in two days, and the cells that pulled it off left descendants 7 times harder to kill, which may be close to how some tumors outlast the treatments meant to finish them.
CancerThe Mesothelioma Drug in This Month's Headlines Was Tested in Fifteen People
The scientist whose lab found the drug's target is also chief science officer of the company selling it, a conflict the breakthrough headlines tuck into a job title.
CancerYounger Generations Are Testing Biologically Older, and Early Cancer Is Tracking the Gap
By a nine-marker blood panel, Americans born in the 1990s scored biologically older than those born in the late 1960s did at the same age, and Washington University researchers found that accelerated aging tracked a higher risk of early-onset cancer.
CancerA Top Cancer Researcher Logged 333 Tumor Reports After COVID Shots and Infection. Now He Wants the Study the Agencies Won't Fund.
Wafik El-Deiry helped map how the p53 gene guards against cancer. Now he has co-authored a review of 333 tumor reports that surfaced or came roaring back after COVID vaccination or infection, plus a blunt admission that no one has produced the population study to rule the vaccine link out.
CancerThe Women Low on Vitamin D Were Three Times as Likely to Wake From a Mastectomy in Serious Pain
Ninety-two breast cancer patients went into a mastectomy deficient in vitamin D; they were three times as likely to be in serious pain afterward and drew far more from the tramadol pump than the women whose levels were fine.
CancerThe Study Breaking Pancreatic Cancer's 'Shield' Was Co-Written by the Drug's Maker
The 'breakthrough' bought engineered mice eleven extra days, its headline human numbers come from a post-hoc subgroup, and one author is the chief scientist of the company that makes the drug.
CancerMD Anderson Made the Case for Radiation Cleanup After Immunotherapy. Then Its Own Trial Undercut It.
In the oligometastatic subgroup the strategy was built for, small and underpowered, the patients who added radiation trended the wrong way: median survival of 42 months against 75.8 for the drugs alone.
CancerUCLA Can Grow Thousands of Cancer-Fighting Cell Doses in Six Weeks. Every Patient So Far Has Been a Mouse.
The lab put a $5,000-a-dose price on an off-the-shelf cancer therapy grown from cord blood that controlled tumors in mice with ovarian cancer and melanoma. No human has received it.
CancerThe Gene That Derails Brain Development Is Also a Brake on Your Killer T Cells
The same gene whose failure derails brain development in children sits like a brake on the CD8 T cells your body uses against chronic hepatitis B and cancer. Take the brake off in the lab, and their fate reroutes toward fighters that do not burn out.
CancerSummit's $500 Million Lung Drug Split the Curve Patients Can't Feel
Ivonescimab delayed tumor progression by 2.4 months in EGFR-mutated lung cancer, but its overall-survival curve never cleared statistical significance and serious treatment-related adverse events nearly doubled.
CancerFused Into One Cell, a Neutrophil and a Macrophage Ate Tumors Two Ways
CAR-macrophage therapy keeps stalling in solid tumors: it can't get in, and it can't finish. Fuse a neutrophil onto it and, in mice, one dose shrank the tumor and kept it from coming back.
CancerThe Breast Cancer Cells That Hide From Chemotherapy Were Already There Before the First Dose
British researchers mapped where dormant breast-tumor cells hide, inside protective pockets of immune and connective cells, and found cells resembling therapy-resistant survivors already parked there before treatment begins.
CancerTwenty People, No Control Arm, and a Startup on the Side: Reading the Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine's Fine Print
Ninety percent of twenty volunteers made KRAS-specific T cells. None was shown to avoid cancer. Two of the investigators co-founded the company that licensed the shot from Johns Hopkins, which stands to collect royalties.
CancerDecades of Cancer Warning Signs, and Still No Proof They Save Lives
England's cancer-awareness campaigns sent more people to the doctor for a decade. The reviews still can't show they caught a single cancer earlier or cut deaths, while the cancers that kill fastest stay silent until it's already too late.
CancerHigh Blood Sugar Hands Cancer Cells a Cloak the Immune System Can't See Through
Grown in a fluid built to mimic the human body, cancer cells used excess glucose to thicken a sugar coating that hid them from immune cells, an effect that never showed up in the standard lab dishes used across cancer biology.
CancerThe Executioner's Second Job: A Death Enzyme That Also Calls NK Cells to the Tumor
Caspase-3, the enzyme biology calls the executioner, turns out to carve a hidden, nucleus-bound form of interleukin-18 that summons NK cells to hunt tumors, a role the study says had gone unrecognized.