Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) – critical but enigmatic players in tumors – exhibit "paradoxical" effects on immunotherapy, according to a new review in Clinical and Translational Discovery. While most CAFs suppress immune cells to accelerate cancer progression, certain subtypes actively restrain tumors. This duality stems from CAFs’ extreme heterogeneity, explaining why depleting all CAFs sometimes backfires by accelerating metastasis.   CAFs sabotage immunotherapy through multiple mechanisms: ...

Gen-AI is increasingly recognized for its potential in healthcare, particularly in complex radiological interpretations. However, the clinical utility of Gen-AI requires thorough validation with real-world data.  Among 184 confirmed malignant lung tumor cases, diagnostic accuracy varied significantly across three models. Gemini achieved highest accuracy, followed by Claude-3-opus, both exceeding 90%, while GPT scored lowest at 65.22%. Statistical analysis confirmed Gemini's diagnostic accuracy in single-image tasks significantly exceeded Claude and GPT. However, Gemini's ...

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be used to write convincing but biased peer reviews that are nearly impossible to distinguish from human writing, a new study reveals. This poses a serious threat to the integrity of scientific publishing, where peer review is the critical process for vetting research quality and accuracy. In a study evaluating the risks of AI in academic publishing, a team of researchers from China tasked the AI model Claude with reviewing 20 real cancer research manuscripts. ...

T cell senescence occurs in the TME, affecting cancer prognosis and immunotherapy efficacy. The TME induces T cell senescence through multiple pathways, including persistent stimulation by tumor-associated antigens, metabolic pathway alterations, activation of chronic inflammatory responses, proliferation of immunosuppressive cells, and T cell damage caused by tumor radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Senescent T cells exhibit characteristics such as genomic instability, protein imbalance, functional subgroup distribution and proportion imbalance, mitochondrial dysfunction with metabolic disorders, and epigenetic changes. Additionally, in the TME, crosstalk between senescent T cells and other immune ...

In low-resource settings, babies born with gastroschisis — a congenital condition in which the developing intestines extend outside the body through a hole in the abdominal wall —face life-threatening challenges. While survival rates in high-income countries now exceed 90% thanks to advanced medical tools and neonatal care, infants in resource-constrained medical settings still face high mortality rates, partially because of a lack of access to the lifesaving equipment needed to treat the condition. A team of engineers ...

Drivers are not the only ones to blame for roadway fatalities. That's the crux of a review article in the New England Journal of Medicine written by a pair of Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) researchers invited to share their insights on the strategies aimed at progressing toward a future with zero traffic deaths. Utilizing publicly available data, research publications, and their own expertise, Charlie Klauer and Zac Doerzaph evaluated the safety treatments and countermeasures that apply to what is known as the Safe System Approach, a framework that broadly embraces the concept that road users are not solely responsible ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE Wednesday, July 30, 2025 5 p.m. Eastern Time   Media Contact: NIH Office of Communications and Public Liaison (301) 496-5787   Beta-HPV can directly cause skin cancer in immunocompromised people NIH case study finds virus drives creation of cancer cells in context of defective T cells   Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have shown for the first time that a type of human papillomavirus (HPV) commonly found on the skin can directly cause a form of skin cancer called cutaneous squamous cell ...

Multi-institutional team, including physicians and researchers who successfully proposed updates to national guidelines, share important next steps for reevaluating how occupational impairment is determined   Last July, a team of physicians and researchers successfully proposed modifications to the American Medical Association (AMA) Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, advocating against the use of race in lung function testing. In a new publication in The New England Journal of Medicine, the team describes the history of how race and pulmonary function testing have been used to quantify lung function impairment, which often determines ...

Each year, thousands of patients worldwide receive CAR-T cell therapy for blood cancers, achieving remarkable success in treating previously incurable conditions. However, concerns about secondary primary malignancies (SPMs) following this revolutionary treatment have prompted global regulatory attention. In a study published in eClinicalMedicine, a group of researchers from China examined the largest dataset to date analyzing secondary cancer risks after CAR-T therapy. "CAR-T therapy has transformed the treatment landscape for refractory blood cancers, ...

Tumor hypoxia refers to the gradual decrease in ATP production when oxygen levels drop below a critical threshold, contributing to malignant tumor development. Studies show hypoxia-induced changes play an indispensable role in tumor progression, enabling tumors to become invasive or metastatic. However, hypoxia's effects vary across tumor types, and these mechanistic differences remain unclear. To address this, we developed THER (https://smuonco.shinyapps.io/THER/), an online tool that allows analysis of hypoxia-associated transcriptomic data without requiring programming skills. THER contains 63 preprocessed datasets from ...

July 30, 2025, NEW YORK – Obesity elevates the risk for at least 13 major cancers, including those of the breast, colon and liver. It also impairs immune responses that target tumors and are stimulated by cancer immunotherapies. But it has long been unclear whether these effects stem from the sheer adiposity—or mass of fat—in people living with obesity or from the specific dietary fats they consume. Now, a decade-long study led by Ludwig Princeton’s Lydia Lynch and reported in the current issue of Nature ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2025 MINNEAPOLIS — Women are less likely than men to receive drugs for multiple sclerosis (MS) between the ages of 18 to 40, during women’s childbearing years, even when those drugs have been shown to be safe for use during pregnancy or to have a prolonged effect against the disease even when stopped before conception, according to a study published on July 30, 2025, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “We found that women were less likely to be treated with a disease-modifying ...

Interpreting the fine print of a chest CT report can make or break a patient’s surgical plan, yet radiologists worldwide face ballooning workloads and widening expertise gaps. A new study from Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University analyzed 13,489 real-world chest CT reports and found that state-of-the-art LLMs can shoulder much of that burden—when asked the right way. ''We discovered that modern language models can act as a dependable second set of eyes for radiologists,'' said Dr. Peng Luo, lead author and physician at Zhujiang Hospital. ''With carefully worded multiple-choice ...

Researchers in China have developed a powerful machine learning model that can help determine which patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) are likely to respond well to radiotherapy—a common treatment for this type of cancer. The study, conducted by scientists at Zhujiang Hospital and Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University, introduces a predictive tool known as the NPC-RSS (Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Radiotherapy Sensitivity Score). Using transcriptomic data and a rigorous machine learning framework ...

 Lung adenocarcinoma remains one of the most challenging cancers to diagnose accurately, with pathologists spending countless hours examining tissue samples under microscopes to determine cancer grades and predict patient outcomes. A new study published in the International Journal of Surgery demonstrates how generative artificial intelligence could fundamentally change this process, offering both speed and precision that rivals human expertise. Dr. Anqi Lin and his research team at Southern Medical University's ...

New research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that prolonged and/or repeated exposure to gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) anesthetic agents (sevoflurane, propofol) for infants in the first two months of life resulted in an accelerated maturation of brain electrical activity patterns evoked by visual stimuli when recorded at 2-5 months of age, compared to infants who did not have early general anesthesia exposure. These findings may suggest the use of non-GABA-active anesthetics for the newborn ...

New measurements of fine microplastic particles suspended in the air in homes and cars suggest that humans may be inhaling far greater amounts of lung-penetrating microplastics than previously thought. Nadiia Yakovenko and colleagues at the Université de Toulouse, France, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on July 30, 2025. Prior research has detected tiny fragments of plastic known as microplastics suspended in the air across a wide variety of outdoor and indoor environments worldwide. The ubiquity of these airborne pollutants has raised concerns about their potential health ...

Indian adults who move to cities are significantly more likely to become obese than their rural counterparts - and the longer they stay, the greater the risk Article URL: http://plos.io/3IxoWh6 Article title: Understanding the impact of urban exposure on obesity among middle and old-age migrants in India Author countries: India Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

A new study of Instagram posts has uncovered strong statistical correlations suggesting that social media images may play a key role in shaping public opinion toward events, with notable social and political effects. Nafiseh Jabbari Tofighi of Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and Reda Alhajj of University of Calgary, Canada, Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on July 30, 2025. Some prior studies have suggested that images and videos on social media can significantly impact users’ sentiments ...

Different dimensions of psychopathy might be associated with different physiological underpinnings of facial emotion recognition - and oxytocin could affect this skill - per scoping review of 66 studies Article URL: http://plos.io/4kFtGPd Article title: Psychophysiology of facial emotion recognition in psychopathy dimensions and oxytocin’s role: A scoping review Author countries: Portugal, U.K. Funding: This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the form of a fellowship awarded to DP (Ref. 2022.00586.CEECIND/CP1722/CT0011; DOI: 10.54499/2022.00586.CEECIND/CP1722/CT0011) and an institutional ...

A holistic approach reveals the global spectrum of knowledge on the impact of cumulative heat exposure on young students, according to an article published July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Konstantina Vasilakopoulou from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and Matthaios Santamouris from the University of New South Wales, Australia. The article aims to shed light on the social and economic inequalities caused within and across countries, the potential adaptive measures to counterbalance ...

An international survey of over 300 adults reveals that males born in summer are potentially more prone to depression than those born in other seasons, though this trend was not mirrored in female study participants. #### Article URL: https://plos.io/4525W1T Article Title: Investigating the association between season of birth and symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults   Author Countries: Canada Funding: This work was supported by Kwantlen Polytechnic University Student Research Innovation Grant (SRIG 2023-60 to AK). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.  END ...

Almost all animals have symmetrical bodies: If we look at the left and right halves of our body, the limbs, eyes and ears are arranged evenly along the axis that runs through the centre of our body. This bilateral symmetry is almost universal in all animals and is only very rarely broken – with exceptions like the five-armed starfish or crab species that have one large and one small claw. One example of broken bilateral symmetry is the cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis, which is native to Lake Tanganyika in Africa. Its head and especially ...

Although metformin has been the go-to medication to manage type 2 diabetes for more than 60 years, researchers still do not have a complete picture of how it works. Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and international collaborators have discovered a previously unrecognized new player mediating clinically relevant effects of metformin: the brain. By uncovering a brain pathway involved in metformin’s anti-diabetic action, researchers have discovered new possibilities for treating diabetes more effectively and precisely. The ...

Embargoed for release: Wednesday, July 30, 2:00 PM ET Key points: Researchers estimated that a 15% increase in U.S. solar power generation could reduce CO2 emissions by 8.54 million metric tons annually, offering major climate benefits. The benefits of added solar power varied widely by region. Areas like California, Florida, Texas, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Southwest exhibited major reductions in emissions from solar increases, while other areas, such as Central, New England, and Tennessee, saw minimal impact. Solar expansion in one region can reduce emissions in neighboring regions, highlighting the importance of ...