Nearly 40% of people with lung cancer experience depression, and many also face anxiety, hopelessness and questions about mortality after diagnosis. Researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) and the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in the College of Social Work (CSW) are leading a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin-assisted therapy can help reduce depression and emotional distress among patients with lung cancer.

Researchers have discovered a window of opportunity to eliminate metastasis at an early stage, before it causes symptoms.

• The finding opens a potential route to stopping the disease before it becomes clinically apparent, effectively paving the way towards prevention. A similar strategy could also be used to prevent relapse after surgery.

• The study was led by the Brain Metastasis Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), with contributions from around ten Spanish institutions and a similar number of centres in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the United States.

• “This is the beginning of the race to prevent metastasis,” says CNIO researcher Manuel Valiente, who led the study. Identifying a stage at which the seeds of metastasis are vulnerable “opens a window of opportunity to attack the disease before symptoms appear”.

• The findings are published in Cancer Cell.