Common medicines may influence CRISPR therapy outcomes and precision cancer treatment

Large-scale drug atlas uncovers new genome editing modulators and potential therapeutic strategies for DNA repair-deficient cancers

05-Jan-2026 - In a new study, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig analyzed the impact of over 2,000 clinically approved drugs on DNA repair and CRISPR genome editing outcomes. They found compounds that can be used to improve genome editing, molecules that selectively ...

Live View: Stress-Induced Changes in Generations of Cancer Cells

26-May-2025 - Cancer cells respond to stress with greater diversity. Drugs that affect DNA replication, or radiation that causes direct DNA damage, lead to increasingly diverse offspring over multiple cell generations. This increases the tumor’s genetic complexity and facilitates the development of resistance ...

DNA origami guides new possibilities in the fight against pancreatic cancer

24-Apr-2025 - One of the challenges of fighting pancreatic cancer is finding ways to penetrate the organ’s dense tissue to define the margins between malignant and normal tissue. A new study uses DNA origami structures to selectively deliver fluorescent imaging agents to pancreatic cancer cells without ...

Deceiving cancer to facilitate treatment

The effect of the phenotypic plasticity of cancer cells and how to exploit it

30-Oct-2023 - Cancer cells are notorious for rapidly changing their phenotype, driving within-host spread and evading treatment. Scientists in Plön used a mathematical model to understand the role of a signal used by cancer cells to control their phenotype. By manipulating these signals, cancer cells can be ...

Well-known cancer driver with new functions

13-Mar-2023 - In connection with the spread of tumors, the transcription factor SNAIL is an old acquaintance. Scientists from the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are now publishing a previously undescribed function of the factor: In a ...

Could new cancer drugs come from potatoes and tomatoes?

Future cancer drugs may one day be formulated from glycoalkaloids found in plants from the genus Solanum

09-Dec-2022 - Everyone knows someone who has had cancer. In 2020, around 19m new cases — and around 10m deaths — were registered worldwide. Treatments are improving all the time but can damage healthy cells or have severe side-effects which are hard on patients; in the search for new, more targeted cancer ...

Computer tool analyzes in detail genetic alterations in the genome of cancer cells

Developed by CSIC, CiberAMP allows establishing direct correlations between changes in the number of gene copies in tumor cells and their expression levels

18-Oct-2022 - A team of researchers from the Salamanca Cancer Research Center (CIC-CSIC-US), a joint institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Salamanca, has developed a new computer tool, called CiberAMP, to analyze in more detail the genetic alterations in the genome of ...

Unstoppable against blood cancer

What was previously only possible in the mouse model, the researchers now show in human cells

26-Jul-2022 - For people with certain forms of leukemia, lymphoma or multiple myeloma, they are sometimes the last chance to beat the cancer: Treatments with chimeric antigen receptor T cells, or CAR T cells for short. For this purpose, T cells are taken from the patient's blood to equip them with artificially ...

Individual Cells Are Smarter Than Thought

25-Jul-2022 - Humans make decisions based on various sensory information which is integrated into a holistic percept by the brain. But how do single cells make decisions? Much more autonomously than previously thought, as researchers from the University of Zurich have now shown. Cells base their decisions not ...

Cancer-fighting viruses soften up their victims before attacking

Researchers based at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital harness virally-programmed extracellular vesicles to shrink tumours in mice

13-Apr-2022 - A research team based at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital has developed a virus that infects and kills cancer cells without harming normal cells, while also sending out signals to prepare nearby uninfected cancer cells for viral attack. Their new study, published in Nature ...