ISB News

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.

We eat things that contain DNA – plants, fungi, animals – and some of that DNA survives passage through the gut. So the Gibbons Lab decided to measure that DNA directly to find out what people tracking their food were actually eating.

Sean Gibbons was interviewed on “The Excerpt,” the flagship podcast of USA TODAY, and discussed his research looking at poop frequency and its implication on health.

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.