Cancer Research UK, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Pancreatic cancer, while rare, is one of the most lethal cancers because the symptoms usually appear at a late stage, and the pancreas’ location makes it challenging to feel any tumors during routine exams.

In a promising pilot study, a new screening tool was able to identify more than 95% of stage I pancreatic cancers from blood samples.The researchers created the new tool based on the knowledge that tumors release small extracellular vesicles containing tumor proteins into the blood. 

The tool can predict the probability of being malignant by using the results from blood samples in conjunction with artificial intelligence. Predicting malignancy at an early stage lays the foundation for more effective cancer treatment. The study is published in Nature Communications Medicine.

Researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG), and game professionals collaborated to develop a videogame that will help advance research on cancer cells.

The game is called GENIGMA and consists of solving a puzzle. That puzzle has “a string of blocks of different colours and shapes. Each string represents a genetic sequence in the cancer cell line, and how players organise the blocks is a potential solution to the location of genes.”
The first step of the game consists of mapping the T-47D breast cancer cell line, a cell line frequently used in cancer research. The players’ data will help create the genomic reference maps.

The game launched on January 27, 2022, and gamers can now enter the #GenigmaChallenge. As mentioned by Oriol Ripoll, gamers will help advance medical research and learn about science simultaneously.

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, led by Tim Errington, just reported the results of an eight-year project where they tried to replicate experiments from 193 preclinical studies published in 53 cancer journals. Preclinical studies refer to studies conducted in animals before being carried out in humans. Those studies were published between 2010 and 2012.
The team could only reproduce 50 experiments out of 193 because of a lack of data, reporting issues, or access to materials.  
To then assess the replication of the 50 experiments, they used five criteria and “found that just 18% succeeded on all five, while 20% failed on all five. Overall, 46% of effects succeeded on most criteria.”
The results are reported in two articles published in eLife, Challenges for assessing replicability in preclinical cancer biology, and Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology.

Nature just published a comment titled, “Five keys to writing a reproducible lab protocol” for better transparency and to avoid similar issues in the future.