Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered what may be the Achilles’ heel of the coronavirus, a finding that may help close the door on COVID-19 and possibly head off future pandemics. The coronavirus is an RNA virus that has, in its enzymatic toolkit, a “proofreading” exoribonuclease, called nsp14-ExoN, which can correct errors in the RNA sequence that occur during replication, when copies of the...

Finding a needle in a haystack is hard enough. But try finding a specific molecule on the needle. Rice University researchers have achieved something of the sort with a new genome editing tool that targets the supporting players in a cell’s nucleus that package DNA and aid gene expression. Their work opens the door to new therapies for cancer and other diseases. Rice bioengineer Isaac Hilton, postdoctoral researcher and lead author Jing Li and their colleagues programmed a...

Researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who profiled more than 45,000 individual cells from patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC), a specific form of metastatic gastric cancer, defined the extensive cellular heterogeneity and identified two distinct subtypes correlated with patient survival. Based on their findings, the researchers developed and validated a gene expression signature capable of predicting patient survival better than other clinical features. If validated in prospective studies, this tool may be useful...

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered that a protein called NF-kappa B-inducing kinase (NIK) is essential for the shift in metabolic activity that occurs with T cell activation, making it a critical factor in regulating the anti-tumor immune response. The preclinical research suggests that elevating NIK activity in T cells may be a promising strategy to enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy, including adoptive cellular therapies and immune checkpoint blockade. In a preclinical melanoma...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a global impact, surgeons at Texas Children’s Fetal Center® have turned to technology to continue teaching their innovative, minimally invasive technique for repairing spina bifida in-utero to fetal surgeons worldwide. Pioneered by a team at Texas Children’s in 2014 led by Dr. Michael Belfort, obstetrician-in-chief at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women and chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, the paradigm-shifting technique allows surgeons...

A phase I/II study led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found IMGN632, a novel CD123-targeting antibody-drug conjugate, was tolerable and resulted in a 29% overall response rate in patients with relapsed/refractory blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN), a rare, but aggressive, form of leukemia, and a 31% overall response rate in BPDCN patients with prior tagraxofusp treatment. Early results from the study were presented by Naveen Pemmaraju, M.D., associate professor of Leukemia. BPDCN is known as...

A team of physicians, environmental scientists and students at the University of Texas Medical Branch have completed a multi-year study of cancer rates among individuals living in close proximity to oil refineries and have found statistically significant increases in several cancers among those living nearest to these facilities. The study, Proximity to Oil Refineries and Risk of Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis, was led by Dr. Stephen B. Williams, Chief of Urology and a tenured professor of...

Researchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new method to isolate specific cells, and in the process found a more robust fluorescent protein. Both the platform and the protein could be highly useful to synthetic biologists and biomedical researchers. They often need to single out cells with specific visual phenotypes like shape or activity determined by their genetic or epigenetic makeup or their developmental history. Rice graduate student Jihwan (James) Lee and François...

A multidisciplinary team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has shown a dominant mutation D614G of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enhances viral replication in the upper respiratory airway, which may contribute to the increased transmission of COVID-19. This finding is important in understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 as well as in the development of vaccines and therapeutic antibodies. “After the emergence of COVID-19, a mutation of D614G appeared in viral spike protein, the molecule that...

Through large-scale profiling of protein changes in response to drug treatments in cancer cell lines, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have generated a valuable resource to aid in predicting drug sensitivity, to understand therapeutic resistance mechanisms, and to identify optimal combination treatment strategies. Their findings include expression changes in more than 200 clinically relevant proteins across more than 300 cell lines after treatment with 168 different compounds, making it the...