TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology) has announced Maralice Conacci-Sorrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, as the recipient of the 2026 Mary Beth Maddox Award and Lectureship in cancer research. She was chosen for her pioneering research revealing how cancer cells harness nutrients to drive their growth and for creating targeted strategies to suppress otherwise untreatable cancers.

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) are molecules that can eliminate disease-causing proteins, but developing them is often slow and complex, limiting how quickly new candidates can be tested. Now, researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed a three-step "click chemistry" assembly line that rapidly builds functional PROTACs from simple building blocks. The resulting molecules successfully degraded a target protein in cells, paving the way for faster, more flexible development of protein-targeting therapeutics.

Kyoto, Japan -- Colorectal cancer, or CRC, is the world's second most lethal cancer based on the number of deaths, and is the third most prevalent malignant tumor. Doctors and patients have long been hoping for better diagnostics for prognosis, such as molecular subtyping, which uses data collected from cancer stem cells, or tumor-initiating cells, to further divide one type of cancer into subgroups. It may correlate with patient outcomes and enable better prognoses.

Though many CRC tissue samples have been analyzed and classified based on mRNA gene expression, currently the practical application of these studies in patient prognosis is limited for colorectal cancer. This motivated a team of researchers from Kyoto University to examine cancer stem cells for the molecular subtyping of CRC.

"We need more comprehensive and clinically useful markers and their signatures to help predict the outcome of each patient," says first author Fumihiko Kakizaki.