November 2024

Immunotherapy is a promising treatment that recruits the immune system to help fight cancer, but it has had limited success in gastrointestinal cancers. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have engineered a probiotic that delivers immunotherapy directly to the gut to shrink tumors in mice, offering a potentially promising oral drug for hard-to-reach cancers.

Malaria, particularly in its severe forms, remains a global health and economic burden. It causes the deaths of more than 600,000 people every year – most of them African children under five. In a new study, published in the journal Nature, researchers from EMBL Barcelona, the University of Texas, the University of Copenhagen, and The Scripps Research Institute have discovered human antibodies that can recognise and target some of the proteins that cause severe malaria. This breakthrough could pave the way for future vaccines or anti-malaria treatments.

While toxic in high concentrations, copper is essential to life as a trace element. Many tumors require significantly more copper than healthy cells for growth a possible new point of attack for cancer treatment. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now introduced a novel method by which copper is effectively removed from tumor cells, killing them.