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Cancer is often caused by improper function of a few proteins, and sometimes it takes only a few proteins to malfunction to cause drastic changes in cells. Here the authors look at the genes that were mutated in patients with a type of pancreatic cancer to identify proteins that are important in causing cancer. They also determined which proteins currently lack effective treatment, and suggest that certain proteins (named KRAS, CDKN2A, and RBBP8) are the most important candidates for developing drugs to treat pancreatic cancer.

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects over 10 million people worldwide. It is caused by destruction of dopamine-producing neurons, which results in severe motor and movement symptoms. In this study, the authors investigated the anti-Parkinsonian effects of two natural compounds curcumin and nicotinamide using C. elegans as a model organism.

Current osteosarcoma (OS) treatments rely on surgery and chemotherapy, but drug resistance remains a major challenge that lowers patient survival rates. Ferroptosis, a form of regulated cell death, has shown promise in cancer therapy but is not well understood in OS. This study explores the use of Ferroptosis in OS.

Acquired drug resistance is an increasing challenge in treating cancer with chemotherapy. One mechanism
behind this resistance is the increased inflammation that supports the progression and development of
cancer that arises because of the drug’s presence. Integrative oncology is the field that focuses on including natural products alongside traditional therapy to create a treatment that focuses on holistic patient well-being.
In this study, the authors demonstrate that the use of an herbal formulation, consisting of turmeric and green tea, alongside a traditional chemotherapeutic drug, 5-fluorouracil (FU) significantly decreases the level of cytokines produced in breast cancer cells when compared to the levels produced when exposed solely to the chemo drug. The authors conclude that this combination of treatment, based on the principle of integrative oncology, shows potential for reducing the resistance against treatment conferred through increased inflammation. Consequently, this suggests a prospective way forward in improving the efficacy of cancer treatment.

The authors test potential anti-inflammatory and pro-apoptotic effects of a polyherbal extract formulation on cultured breast cancer cells.

In this study, the authors use high-throughput virtual screening to design and evaluate a set of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors for binding affinity to the protein reverse transcriptase. These studies have important applications toward HIV therapies.

Here, the authors chose to investigate the efficacy of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) and cisplatin or zinc ions in inducing cancer apoptosis. While both treatments were found to reduce the proliferation of lung cancer cells, the authors suggest that further studies to identify the mechanism are necessary.

Due to a critical shortage of donor hearts, researchers are exploring cardiac xenotransplantation—transplanting animal hearts into humans—as a potential solution. This study synthesized nearly two decades of preclinical research to evaluate multiple factors affecting xenograft survival.

This study investigates the effects of the PROTAC compound A1874 on CT26 colon carcinoma cells, focusing on its ability to degrade the protein BRD4 and reduce cell viability. While A1874 had previously shown effectiveness in other colon cancer cell lines, its impact on CT26 cells was unknown.

Here, the authors investigated the integration of large language models (LLMs) with drug target affinity predictors (DTAPs) to improve drug repurposing, demonstrating a significant increase in prediction accuracy, particularly with GPT-4, for psychotropic drugs and the sigma-1 receptor. This novel approach offers to potentially accelerate and reduce the cost of drug discovery by efficiently identifying new therapeutic uses for existing drugs.