Media Coverage (Cancers)

Research from the Heath and Wei labs has uncovered the rapid cellular mechanisms that melanoma cells employ to develop resistance to the cancer drug vemurafenib. By closely examining the initial hours and days after drug exposure, the study reveals how cancer cells activate a backup communication system to bypass the drug’s effects, suggesting potential new combination treatment strategies to overcome this resistance.

Work out of the Heath and Wei labs identified a survival mechanism that allows melanoma cells to quickly evade BRAF inhibitor treatments, and a reversible adaptation that can occur within hours of the first treatment and does not rely on reactivating the BRAF-ERK pathway.

The Wei and Heath labs and collaborators from MIT have uncovered a stealth survival strategy that melanoma cells use to evade targeted therapy, offering a promising new approach to improving treatment outcomes.

Sui Huang challenges the prevailing view of cancer as purely genetic. Huang and colleagues argue that many cancers lack identifiable driver mutations, suggesting non-genetic factors and disrupted gene regulatory networks may play crucial roles in cancer development.

ISB’s Heath Lab discovered key insights into how T cells – the body’s frontline immune soldiers – respond to infections like COVID-19.

Thorsson-Shmulevich Lab members helped create a free resource to aid in the classification of patient tumor samples based on distinct molecular features identified by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Network.

ISB researchers offer promising avenues for exploring multi-disease therapeutic strategies.

ISB President Dr. Jim Heath talked with Science in Seattle in a wide-ranging interview that touched on his paper in Cell Reports showing how T-cell receptors form, his transition from chemistry to biology, challenges facing life scientists, and more.