Top Cancer Research Advances at MSK in 2025
image: Researchers across MSK continued to make strides against cancer in 2025 and to illuminate fundamental human biology. Here, research associate Dr. Binglong Zhang of the Eric Lai Lab works on a research project.
Credit: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) continued to make strides against cancer in 2025. Laboratory research teams across the institution worked to advance the understanding of cancer cells and to develop new therapies, while also making fundamental insights into human biology and disease.
“At MSK, research and cancer care are inseparable,” says MSK President and CEO Selwyn M. Vickers, MD, FACS. “Our scientists continue to reveal how cancer works, and the foundational discoveries we’re making today will transform medicine in the years to come.”
Here are some of the most exciting scientific discoveries reported over the past year, in chronological order.
New AI Tool Uses Routine Blood Tests To Predict Immunotherapy Response for Many Cancers
Doctors around the world may soon have access to a new tool that could better predict whether individual cancer patients will benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitors using only routine blood tests and clinical data.
The artificial intelligence-based model, dubbed SCORPIO, was developed by a team of researchers from MSK and the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai.
The model is not only cheaper and more accessible, it’s significantly better at predicting outcomes than the two current biomarkers approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to findings published January 6 in Nature Medicine.
Read more.
Why New Precision Oncology Cancer Treatments Benefit Patients of Some Ancestries More Than Others
Nearly half of all new cancer drugs approved by the FDA over the past quarter-century have received that approval based on their ability to target genetic changes driving tumor growth.
Medical oncologists use information about the genetic mutations found in tumors to match patients with specific precision oncology therapies — many of which have become part of standard treatment. Many more precision oncology treatments are being tested in clinical trials.
Unfortunately, not all patients have benefited equally from this molecular matchmaking. Patients of European ancestry are more likely to find a match to the latest treatments than patients of other ancestries, according to an MSK study published January 9 in JAMA Oncology.
New MSK Research a Step Toward Readymade CAR T Cell Therapy for Cancer
CAR T cell therapy is one of the most promising new cancer treatments to emerge in recent years. It involves removing a patient’s own immune T cells and engineering them to recognize specific targets on the surface of the cancer cell.
A major limitation of this type of CAR T cell therapy is that the cells are taken from the patient and must be custom-made into a treatment.
Now research at MSK has demonstrated a new advance that could make it possible to use CAR T cells provided by healthy donors — these “readymade” vaccines could be mass-produced and stored for immediate use, so they are ready as soon as the patient needs them. The findings were published January 30 in Nature.
Digging Into a Decades-Old Hepatitis B Mystery Suggests a Potential New Treatment
In their effort to answer a decades-old biological question about how the hepatitis B virus is able to establish infection of liver cells, research led by MSK, Weill Cornell Medicine, and The Rockefeller University identified a vulnerability that opens the door to new treatments.
The team successfully disrupted the virus’s ability to infect human liver cells in the laboratory using a compound already in clinical trials against cancer — laying the groundwork for animal model studies and potential drug development based on their insights, according to findings published February 20 in Cell.
Hepatitis B is a liver infection that affects almost 5% of the world’s population. It causes long-term damage to liver cells and is one of the leading causes of liver cancer.
Cryo-Electron Microscopy Sheds New Light on Cancer Target
Every day, billions of cells in your body divide, helping to replace old and injured cells with new ones. And each time this happens, your entire genetic library — your genome, which totals more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA — has to be copied, precisely, from the parent cell to the new daughter cell.
When organisms encounter problems — what scientists call “replication stress” — this process is more prone to errors, which often cause mutations in the genetic code. These mutations can be copied forward and give rise to cancer and other diseases.
One source of this stress is when the bio-machinery that does that copying gets physically stuck. And one of the things it can get stuck on is the DNA template itself, which can adopt alternative structures in certain contexts. For example, regions of the genome that are rich in guanine bases (represented by G in the DNA code) can fold into a DNA structure called a G-quadruplex, or G4 for short, which is more compact than normal DNA.
Using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a team of structural and molecular biologists at MSK set out to investigate G4s — which have gained attention as potential therapeutic targets in cancer — working to understand their influence on DNA replication. Their findings were published March 7 in Science.
How Reprogrammed Immune Cells Can Use Fructose To Fight Cancer
Immune cells might be reprogrammed to use the body’s fructose — a naturally occurring sugar — as an energy source that supercharges them to fight cancer, researchers at MSK have found. The engineered immune cells showed strong anti-tumor effects in mouse models. The finding suggests the potential for enabling cells to use the body’s ample fructose as “jet fuel” to increase their power.
The retooled cells could metabolize fructose in the tumor microenvironment — the noncancerous cells, tissues, and blood vessels that surround a tumor. T cells engineered to exploit fructose in that environment could gain a huge boost in fighting the tumor, according to findings published March 10 in Cancer Cell.
MSK Researchers Identify Key Player in Childhood Food Allergies: Thetis Cells
A decade ago, a clinical trial in the U.K. famously showed that children who were exposed to peanuts in the early months of life had reduced risk of developing a peanut allergy compared with children who avoided peanuts.
Now, researchers at MSK have a likely answer as to why that’s the case: Thetis cells.
This recently discovered class of immune cells, which were first described by MSK researchers in 2022, plays an essential and previously unknown role in suppressing inflammatory responses to food, according to findings published May 15 in Science.
By shedding new light on how Thetis cells work and how they participate in the development of immune responses early in life, researchers are also getting new insights into how they may influence the immune response to early childhood cancers.
New Understanding of a Decades-Old Bladder Cancer Treatment Could Help Improve Immunotherapies More Broadly
More than three decades ago, the FDA approved Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) as the first immunotherapy against cancer. And it is still used today to treat early-stage bladder cancer.
Now, a team of researchers from MSK and Weill Cornell Medicine is expanding the understanding of how the treatment works — an understanding that could help improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies more broadly.
In a new study, published May 29 in Cancer Cell, the researchers showed BCG doesn’t just work locally in the bladder, but reprograms and amplifies cells in the bone marrow that give rise to a class of immune cells called myeloid cells — boosting the immune system’s ability to fight cancer more generally.
DeepHeme, a New AI Tool To Improve Blood Cancer Diagnosis
Researchers at MSK, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called DeepHeme that can help automate the diagnosis of blood and bone marrow cancers. The study was published June 11 in Science Translational Medicine.
Traditionally, diagnosing these cancers has required doctors to manually count and classify hundreds of cells under a microscope — a labor-intensive process used to detect disease and determine cancer stage. DeepHeme uses AI to perform this task with expert-level accuracy, reducing the time required from more than 30 minutes to just seconds. The model was trained on nearly 50,000 annotated digital cell images. It was then tested on unseen cases and found to match or exceed the performance of expert pathologists.
Why Does CAR T Cell Therapy Fail? MSK Research Points to FAS-L Proteins
A team of MSK researchers have made an important finding about why genetically engineered immune cells sometimes fail to finish the job when given as a cancer treatment.
The research team had previously found that engineered immune cells such as CAR T cells lose persistence because of the interaction between a protein called FAS, which sits on their surface, and a molecule that binds to the protein, called FAS ligand (FAS-L) — which causes the immune cell to self-destruct.
In a new study, the researchers made the surprising finding that FAS-L is produced by the immune cells themselves. The findings, published July 22 in Nature Cancer, point the way to reengineering T cells and other immune cells to enable cell therapies to work more consistently for patients.
To Study Treatment Resistance in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer, MSK Researchers Develop New Approach
Several factors make ovarian cancer particularly challenging to treat. This is largely because the cancer often spreads at a microscopic level within the abdomen early on, resulting in diagnosis at an advanced stage. Additionally, while initial treatments with surgery, chemotherapy, and maintenance therapies are successful for many people, most advanced stage ovarian cancers eventually come back.
Now a research team at MSK is aiming to find new ways to stop the most common and deadly form of ovarian cancer — high-grade serous ovarian cancer — from recurring, with the help of a method they developed for tracking the evolution of treatment-resistant cells in ovarian cancer using blood tests.
Their findings, which were published October 1 in Nature, may help develop new approaches for identifying — and ultimately targeting — the specific subpopulations of cells that cause recurrence.
MSK Researchers Solve a Key Colorectal Cancer Mystery
In most solid tumors, high numbers of regulatory T (Treg) cells are associated with poorer outcomes because they dampen the immune system’s ability to fight a tumor.
Colorectal cancer, however, is a puzzling exception. A high density of Treg cells in colorectal tumors is actually associated with better survival — though scientists haven’t been sure why.
Now a new study by researchers from the Sloan Kettering Institute at MSK offers an answer to this mystery — one that could help improve immunotherapy treatment for the majority of patients with colorectal cancer, and potentially for other cancers that affect tissues such as the skin and the lining of the stomach, mouth, and throat.
The research team discovered that it’s not just the number of Treg cells that’s important, but what type they are, according to findings published December 15 in Immunity.
Instead of the regulatory T cells promoting tumor growth, as they do in most cancers, in colorectal cancer the team discovered there are two distinct subtypes of Treg cells that play opposing roles — one restrains tumor growth, while the other fuels it.