USC researchers have received a five-year NIH grant of up to $3.2 million to investigate how the hormone thymulin regulates age-related inflammation, or inflammaging, and whether it can improve responses to cancer immunotherapy. Building on earlier findings that thymulin helps suppress chronic inflammation and may enhance treatment effectiveness in older mice, the team will study its molecular mechanisms and therapeutic potential in aged mouse models of breast cancer and melanoma, as well as in human cells. The project aims to clarify how aging alters the immune system and to identify new strategies that could help older patients respond better to immunotherapy and potentially combat metastatic cancer.

New research from the University of Oklahoma demonstrates how an aggressive form of breast cancer co-opts the body’s own immune system to attract nerves that fuel tumor growth.

PD-L1 is best known as the molecular "off switch" cancer cells use to disable the immune system at their surface. In recent years, however, it has become clear that PD-L1 can also enter the nucleus, yet what drives it there, and what it does once inside, has remained largely a mystery. Researchers from Zhejiang University and the University of Macau now provide an answer: DDB1, a protein adaptor, tags PD-L1 with K63-linked ubiquitin chains at the K185 site—a modification that does two things at once. It removes an acetylation mark that would otherwise keep PD-L1 out of the nucleus, and it enables the nuclear protein to bind DNA and switch on a program of immunosuppressive genes. In breast cancer patients resistant to immunotherapy, this nuclear form of PD-L1 was markedly elevated. Remarkably, thalidomide, an old drug already used for multiple myeloma, disrupts the DDB1–PD-L1 partnership. Combined with anti-PD-1 antibody in mouse models, the therapy shrank tumors dramatically, boosted infiltration of cancer-killing T cells, and extended survival. Published in Science Bulletin, the study uncovers a non-canonical route to immune evasion and offers a "repurposed" combination strategy poised for clinical testing.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) criteria used to decide who should be referred by GPs for further breast cancer risk assessment and specialist care misses up to 95% of women under 50 who will go on to develop the disease in the next 10 years, new research by researchers at the University of Cambridge and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, has found.

A new Houston Methodist-led study reports a breakthrough in understanding why some patients with metastatic breast cancer fail to respond to a common and important early-stage treatment.