The 7 Most Exciting Cancer Stories of 2022

Covering medical science and health stories over the past few years, I have seen significant and encouraging progress against cancer. In 2022, some of my favorite stories described exciting new areas of research, from the roles fungi can play in tumor biology to the burgeoning field of cancer diagnostics for our pets.

National Cancer Institute

While most vaccines take 10 to 15 years to develop, the most popular coronavirus vaccines began entering the world in less than a year, thanks in part to decades of previous work by scientists developing similar vaccines to treat cancer. Many of these inoculations rely on strands of messenger RNA, or mRNA, that prime immune cells to recognize and destroy invaders, whether viruses or tumor cells. In cancer cases, however, not all cells are exactly alike and cancer vaccines are used as a treatment rather than a means of prevention, which means these vaccines have encountered more hurdles. With advances in mRNA technology and insights from coronavirus research, scientists hope to overcome these cancer vaccine challenges. “Unfortunately, it took a pandemic for mRNA vaccines to be widely accepted by the scientific community,” says biomedical scientist Karine Breckpot, who studies mRNA vaccines at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. “But the global use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines has demonstrated the safety of this approach and will open doors for cancer vaccines.”

(Cancer vaccines show promise. Here’s how they work.)

Scientific news

The first CAR T-cell immunotherapy has only been approved by the US FDA in 2017, but the technology has since emerged as one of the most promising treatments for a variety of cancers. CAR-based therapies involve removing a person’s immune cells and genetically modifying them to better recognize and fight cancer before injecting them back into the body. In 2010, two blood cancer patients received a form of CAR T-cell therapy; now, a decade later, these patients are still in remission. In a February briefing announcing the results, University of Pennsylvania oncologist David Porter said the therapy worked “beyond our wildest expectations.” CAR therapies don’t work for everyone, but they have been shown to be very effective for some cancers and adaptable to other conditions. Last September, researchers reported that five patients with lupus, an autoimmune disease, received CAR T cell treatments that appeared to reset their immune systems and banish their symptoms. Talk to Scientific newsimmunologist Linrong Lu of the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute called the results “groundbreaking.”

Quanta Magazine

If you could visualize the trillions of cells that make up a human body, each person would appear covered in the cellular equivalent of static television – an ever-changing flicker of cells moving back and forth. “Every day you look at your body and it doesn’t change much,” said Peter Devreotes, a cell biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Quantum. “But the cells in it are constantly migrating.” Researchers have generally thought that cells move along simple gradients of chemicals or molecules, similar to following the smell of cookies to a bakery. But scientists have recently identified ‘self-generated gradients’ that cells can use to navigate, even through miniature mazes designed to mimic the famous hedge maze at Hampton Court in London. They do this by metabolizing the chemicals around them to create a new gradient or, in some cases, by softening the cells around them, resulting in a stiffness gradient. Such movement has since been implicated in everything from cancer progression to immune cell migration to embryonic development; this may have implications for therapies designed to attract cancer cells to areas where they are more vulnerable. “We now see it everywhere, suddenly,” says Jonna Alanko, post-doctoral researcher at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology. “I’m pretty sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg..”

New statistics

About 90% of people who take part in clinical trials are white and only about 40% are women. But increasingly, scientists are realizing how factors such as race, ethnicity and gender affect a person’s individual risk of developing diseases and their response to treatment. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, has launched a clinical trial called WISDOM to challenge the conventional recommendation that women should have annual mammograms, which she says is based on outdated information that can lead to unnecessary medical tests. Instead, the trial will calculate a ‘risk score’ which incorporates a person’s age, reproductive history, family history, breast density and genetic landscape to determine how often they should pass. a mammogram. Recruiting a diverse cohort, Esserman had to embrace new ways of thinking and engaging with patients, including seeking input from black women for her study design. “The big rationale for the WISDOM trial is to say, can we think of anything else that tells us about the risk to you as an individual,” Esserman said. STAT. “It’s the breakthrough, the new technology, and unless you build equity into the trials, it may actually not help black women and actually make their outcomes worse..”

The New York Times

In 2020, several research groups independently noted that tumors, long thought to be sterile, are actually infested with microbes. At first, much of the work was to examine the bacterial component of this tumor microbiome, but this year scientists turned their attention also to the fungal fraction, identifying fungi in tumors from 35 different cancers and identifying tumor-associated fungi in seven different parts of the body, results that surprised some field workers. The researchers have since noted that the total assembly found in a tumor – which includes viruses, bacteriophages and protozoa as well as bacteria and fungi – is often unique to the type of cancer. So scientists can now use the microbiome to detect and monitor cancer earlier, to diagnose tricky cases, and to develop therapies that manipulate the microbiome to kill cancer outright, or at least make it more susceptible to existing treatments..

The scientist

One in five American households adopted a new pet during the COVID-19 pandemic, and research has shown that people are increasingly willing to shell out more money for their pets’ medical needs. “Pet owners are much more open to specialized care and advanced diagnostics,” said veterinary oncologist Andi Flory. The scientist. “And they treat their pets like family and have come to expect the same level of health care for their pets. [that] they do for themselves. Several companies have released diagnostic tools that use genomic data to flag more than 40 types of canine cancer and to develop personalized treatments. But unlike tests developed for human use, animal tests do not require regulatory approval. One in four dogs will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime; not all are ultimately fatal, but the diagnosis can cause owners to pay large sums, often out of pocket, only to find that there are few treatments available. To develop better tools and therapies, companies are creating databases to better characterize genetic variation in canine populations.

Atlantic

Michael Goldman rolled up his sleeve for his COVID-19 reminder in September 2021, shortly after being diagnosed with lymphoma. An immunologist himself, Goldman knew chemotherapy would soon leave him immune-compromised, and he wanted to do everything he could to protect himself. Three weeks later, however, his cancer had spread dramatically, and Goldman and his brother, a nuclear medicine specialist, suspected the booster had exacerbated the disease. While recuperating at home, Goldman pored over the scientific literature and finally exposed what he suspected had happened to him, the findings he published in a document at the end of 2021. The booster appeared to have done what it was supposed to – supercharge its helper T cells to battle the virus – but in its case, those cells had gone too far, causing its cancer to spread out of control. Goldman said Atlantic that he “remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are necessary and useful for the vast majority of people.” But he is now advocating for scientists to collect more rigorous data on side effects, even those, as in his case, that are extremely rare..