September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. While cancer in children does not occur as often as in adults, research on childhood cancers is an integral part of the world’s biomedical community effort to study and fight cancer. Researchers across the globe work on understanding childhood cancers and developing new therapies.

New research has just been published on Atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (ATRT). ATRT is a very rare and difficult to treat form of brain cancer occurring most of the time in three-year-old children or younger.

The new study led by an international team of researchers focused on the inactivation of one single gene, called SMARCB1, and its interaction with the development of ATRT. Previous studies have shown the link between the inactivation of the gene SMARCB1 and ATRT, but this new study demonstrates how the loss of SMARCB1 might disrupt neural development and lead to tumor growth.

The study was published in the journal Genes & Development. The authors hope that this discovery will help with developing targeted therapies.

Source: Wenjing Wu

Designing drugs that attack only tumor cells but not healthy cells is complicated.

Xuequan Zhou, a PhD student from Leiden University, created an anticancer compound with a molecule that can self-organize in nanoparticles and become activated only under blue light irradiation. The new properties allow the drug to be activated only when needed and thus could be instrumental in killing cancer cells without damaging healthy cells. The research team conducted experiments in vitro and also in vivo using a mouse tumor model. The article is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Along similar lines, a team from Penn State University developed light-activated nanoparticles to target cancer cells. The nanoparticles can bind with microRNA (miRNA) molecules, and those can be released in the cancer cells when exposed to light, thus sparing healthy tissue. The miRNA molecules will then pair to a messenger mRNA and inhibit proteins’ production essential for cancer cells’ survival. The paper is published in Biomaterials.

A new study by researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who had germline or somatic mutations in DNA repair genes responded better to platinum-based chemotherapy compared to patients without those mutations. The study was published in Clinical Cancer Research. Dr. O’Reilly, senior author on the study, pointed out that “The results underscore the importance of genetic testing in newly diagnosed patients to help refine treatment decisions.”

Another genetic study demonstrated for the first time that not only genetic mutations but pre-existing genetics can promote metastatic cancer spread. The research led by a team from Rockefeller University was published in Nature Medicine.