International Research Chemistry Awards

  Researchers working on an incurable blood cancer can now use a new lab model which could make testing potential new treatments and diagnostics easier and quicker, new research has found. In a paper published in Nature Communications a team of researchers led from the University of Birmingham have studied blood cells from patients with a blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome disease (MDS). This disease often develops into a highly aggressive form of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). Working with this new model has led to confirmation that a mutation in the gene CEBPA causes progression from MDS to AML. Behaved just like patient's real cells The team set out to examine whether changes to the gene CEBPA were driving disease progression in patients with MDS, or whether mutations were a passenger as the blood cancer developed into the more serious AML. The team took blood cells from a patient that was diagnosed with MDS and reprogrammed these cells into iPSCs using a genetic trick...

  For the first time, scientists have systematically studied the genetic effects of chemotherapy on healthy tissues. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) and their collaborators analysed blood cell genomes from 23 patients of all ages who had been treated with a range of chemotherapies . Published today (1 July) in Nature Genetics, the researchers show that many but not all chemotherapy agents cause mutations and premature aging in healthy blood. As part of Cancer Grand Challenges team Mutographs, the researchers uncovered new patterns of DNA damage, or mutational signatures, associated with specific chemotherapy drugs. The researchers suggest that the damaging genetic effects of chemotherapy identified by whole genome sequencing could guide the future treatment of patients with effective chemotherapies that have less harmful effects on healthy tissues. Chemotherapy is a type of anti-c...

  A new review was published in Volume 16 of Oncotarget on June 17, 2025, titled "Optimizing enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab therapy." First authors Elias Antoine Karam of the Gustave Roussy and Saint-Joseph University of Beirut and Yaghi César Céline from the Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, along with their colleagues, reviewed recent developments about treating advanced urothelial carcinoma (aUC), an aggressive form of bladder cancer. Their review highlights how combining enfortumab vedotin and pembrolizumab as a first-line treatment offers a major improvement for patients with limited options and poor prognoses. Advanced urothelial cancer has traditionally been treated with platinum-based chemotherapy , which often causes serious side effects and offers limited long-term benefit. Many patients are even ineligible for it due to underlying health conditions. The new combination presents a more effective and better-tolerated alternative, as shown in recent clinical ...

  In a recent study published in the JAMA Network Open, researchers evaluated whether a commercial artificial intelligence (AI) tool, originally developed for breast cancer detection, could leverage screening mammograms to estimate the risk of future breast cancer development years before clinical diagnosis. They used a cohort study comprising almost 350,000 screening examinations from 116,495 women to generate AI-based cancer detection scores, which were assessed as proxies for subsequent breast cancer risk rather than for direct diagnosis. Study findings revealed that the AI algorithm assigned higher cancer detection scores to breasts that would later develop breast cancer, even 4–6 years before clinical diagnosis, compared to breasts that did not develop cancer. This suggests that commercial AI tools may help identify women at higher risk of developing breast cancer well in advance of diagnosis, providing a pathway for more personalized risk-based screening and earlier intervent...