Systemic therapy targets in mesothelioma.

Recent changes to clinical practice have made modest improvements in 1– 2-year survival, but longer-term survival remains unchanged, and durable benefit is very rare.

Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapy, particularly with novel bispecific agents, may result in more therapeutic modalities being administered together in the first-line setting. The current evidence for second-line treatments is sparse.

New targeted-therapy strategies are promising. Early-phase clinical trials are showing signals of efficacy in mesotheliomas harboring MTAP loss or inactivation of the Hippo pathway.

Further studies will be needed to robustly confirm clinical benefit. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/Mesothelioma

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Mesothelioma is a rare cancer that has seen few incremental improvements in survival over the past two decades. However, a significantly improved understanding of the underlying biology has led to new therapeutic advances with the potential to improve clinical outcomes. In this review, we take a snapshot of the current systemic therapy research landscape, with our goal to forecast the trajectory of drug development for mesothelioma over the next half-decade. In our current census, we identify 106 active trials including systemic therapies: 20 (19%) are molecularly targeted, 26 (25%) include immunomodulation, and 12 (11%) combining immunotherapy with antiangiogenic therapies. Collectively, the landscape of therapeutic innovation for mesothelioma is expanding, bringing hope that improvements in life expectancy may follow.

Highlighting the potential of PTH1R receptor agonist therapy in autosomal dominant hypocalcemia type 1

https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI201759 In this Research Letter, Rajesh V. Thakker & team report on the use of Eneboparatide in mice with ADH1, which increased serum calcium levels without increasing urine calcium.

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³Mary Lyon Centre, MRC Harwell, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

⁴Endocrine Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

⁵William Harvey Research Institute, London School of Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.

A promising cancer therapy, targeting infected tumors, is set for its first human trials as soon as May/June. This innovative approach shows potential for various solid cancers and could significantly impact treatment timelines, offering hope particularly for pancreatic cancer patients.

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Dr. Janine Gaiha-Rohrbach, Ph.D. — Head of Global Medical Immunology, Biogen.

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Preventing transplant loss doesn’t just save organs—it could eliminate hospitalizations, reduce lifelong medications, and transform millions of lives.

Dr. Janine Gaiha-Rohrbach, Ph.D. is a globally recognized leader in immunology and medical strategy, currently serving as Head of Global Medical Immunology at Biogen (https://www.biogen.com/).

With a PhD in Immunology and Virology from the University Hospital of Berne and extensive postdoctoral research at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, Dr. Gaiha-Rohrbach has dedicated her career to translating complex scientific advances into high-impact patient care.

Throughout her career, Dr. Gaiha-Rohrbach has driven innovation across diverse therapeutic areas, including HIV, hepatitis, NASH, and specialized immunology, leading multiple new product launches and shaping global strategies to expand patient access.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” goes the old adage, which Rice University professor James Chappell completely ignored in a recent Nature Communications publication. In the study, Chappell describes an innovation in plasmids, circular pieces of DNA that have been a workhorse of molecular biology research since the 1970s.

“For decades, we’ve been designing experiments around two major limitations of plasmids: fixed copy numbers and incompatibility,” said Chappell, the corresponding author on the study. “While functional, such workarounds are clunky. We created a synthetic version of a part of the plasmid called the origin of replication that allows us to modify the plasmid instead of modifying the experiment.”

Plasmids are typically put into bacterial cells, where they use the cell’s machinery to build proteins and create copies of themselves. Each plasmid generates tiny pieces of a stop signal, called a negative regulator, which binds to the origin of replication (ORI).

Scientists have created the first microlasers capable of detecting individual molecules and even single atomic ions, a breakthrough that could significantly advance early disease diagnosis and molecular-scale medical testing. Researchers at the University of Exeter’s Living Systems Institute have published their work in Nature Photonics. The paper opens up new possibilities for microlaser biosensing technology, including “lab-on-a-chip” technology capable of instant medical testing and diagnosis.

Microlasers are tiny glass beads measuring around just 0.1 mm (the width of a human hair) to 0.01 mm (the length of a single bacterium). With a central cavity that acts as a tiny mirror, they emit and bounce light in a circular motion around the bead. This circular path of trapped light is known as whispering gallery modes (WGM) laser technology.

Light continuously circulates around the sphere’s inner boundary, enabling the device to detect extremely small disturbances on its surface. Previous research has shown that such microlasers can even be inserted into living cells, acting as optical barcodes to track cellular movement inside organisms.