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Credit: Dr P. Marazzi/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Results from a Phase I/IIb clinical trial show that laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) can significantly boost the effects of immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs in patients with recurrent high-grade astrocytoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer which includes glioblastoma. Published today in Nature Communications, the findings reveal that a combination of LITT with pembrolizumab helps immune cells cross the blood-brain barrier to attack the tumor, increasing median survival from 5.2 to 11.8 months.  “These results suggest that LITT can help the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab work more effectively against high-grade astrocytoma,” said David…

Credit: Viriya Sanguanchua/EyeEm/Getty Images Rice is a staple food for billions of people worldwide, but environmental and climate changes threaten the agricultural yields necessary to support the needs of an ever growing human population. Many researchers have explored how to increase rice yield sustainably, detail the genetic variation between cultivated and wild rice, identify engineering opportunities, and develop genetically modified variants of multiple plants, including rice. New research has taken a step back to get a broader view of the interaction between the plants and the soils in which they grow. An international team from the University of Oxford, Nanjing…

Credit: selvanegra / iStock / Getty Images Plus Bitter taste sensitivity. The photic sneeze reflex. Earwax type. On the spectrum of genetic variation, these traits fall on the innocuous, even whimsical, end. At the opposite extreme lie rare, life-threatening mutations. Between those poles sits a vast and more subtle territory, one that includes genetic variants that influence behavior. Somewhere in there, nicotine addiction lies. For decades, scientists have known that nicotine exerts its grip on the brain by binding to specialized receptors—nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs)—that activate reward circuits. But what if some people are born with slightly altered versions of…

Molecular model of the tumor suppressor protein p53 (beige) bound to a molecule of DNA (red and blue). P53 maintains genomic stability by controlling cell division, repairing DNA damage, and initiating apoptosis in compromised cells. Mutations in this gene, found in ~50% of cancers, enable aggressive, uncontrolled tumor growth. [Laguna Design/Getty Images] PMV Pharmaceuticals, which focuses on the discovery and development of small molecule therapies targeting p53, reported the results from the Phase I, first-in-human portion of the ongoing Phase I/II PYNNACLE study evaluating rezatapopt in patients with advanced solid tumors harboring a TP53 Y220C mutation. The study, “Phase I Study…

Credit: Larry Washburn / Getty Images It seems that relationships are key even when it comes to bacteria, with research suggesting that health is driven more by how gut microbes interact than the individual species themselves. The findings, in Science, reveal the importance of dysbiosis—an imbalance in gut microbial communities—and show how interactions within the microbiome can act as a marker distinguishing health from disease. They also offer a potential explanation for the benefits offered by fecal transplants, which restore entire microbe communities and maintain their healthy interactions rather than focusing on individual species. Lead researcher Roberto Corral López, PhD,…

[L-R] Baisong Mei, Anna O’Driscoll chat with City Therapeutics CEO Andy Orth. City Therapeutics, a startup whose co-founders include RNA interference drug pioneer John Maraganore, PhD, is building a pipeline of treatment candidates based on tiny RNAs called cleavage-inducing tiny guide RNAs (cityRNAs). [City Therapeutics] About a year after retiring as founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he led pioneering efforts to develop drugs based on RNA interference (RNAi), John Maraganore, PhD, came across a paper in PNAS detailing how tiny RNAs called cleavage-inducing tiny guide RNAs (cityRNAs) induced gene silencing by enabling the argonaute-3 (AGO3) protein to slice through…

Credit: koto_feja / iStock / Getty Images Plus Investigators at Scripps Research have discovered that droplet-like compartments that form without membranes called biomolecular condensates can contain an internal filament architecture that is required for their function, a discovery that is counter to current views that they are simple liquids. The findings, published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, suggest that these defined structural features could serve as drug targets in diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, where disruption of condensate formation and material properties contribute to disease pathology. “Ever since we realized that disruptions in condensate formation are at…

Samsung Biologics will develop a “ready-to-activate” vaccine manufacturing process that can be deployed during health emergencies, under a new agreement with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). The agreement will see Samsung join CEPI’s Vaccine Manufacturing Facility Network (VMFN), which is a group of firms focused on ensuring that protein-based vaccines are available during outbreaks. Matthew Downham, CEPI’s director of manufacturing and supply chain networks, tells GEN, “Through this partnership, CEPI and Samsung Biologics will establish a pre-agreed, ready-to-activate manufacturing process for recombinant protein vaccines that can be deployed rapidly in a future epidemic or pandemic. “The focus is…

Credit: Christoph Burgstedt/Getty Images Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have shown that a novel metric, tumor-specific total mRNA expression (TmS), better predicts chemotherapy response than existing methods for defining triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtypes. The new, pathway-independent tool, developed by Wenyi Wang, PhD, professor of bioinformatics and computational biology, and colleagues, is derived from matched RNA and DNA sequencing data. “Most existing TNBC classification strategies, such as the Lehmann or Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center (FUSCC) subtypes, are based on expression patterns of selected genes alone, essentially asking ‘what types of genes are turned on’,”…

A combined fermenter-extractor-separator has been developed by researchers at Iowa State University. Because it uses the Taylor vortex design, it is gentler than traditional fermentation, extraction, and separation techniques, which makes it attractive for microbe production and other biotech applications. Called the Taylor Vortex Fermenter-Extractor-Separator, it is envisioned as a bioreactor for small volumes of value-added products and for process intensification. It could be a significant improvement over the types of fermenters the biopharma industry inherited from the chemical industry. The biopharma industry “has gone a fair distance using them, but non-uniform mixing is not ideal for microorganisms,” Dennis Vigil,…