A new USC study has found evidence that targeting CD47, a protein that is part of the innate immune system, could be a key step in fighting colorectal cancer. It is one of the first indications that targeting part of the innate immune system, combined with traditional immunotherapy drugs which work on the adaptive immune system, could be more effective in fighting colorectal cancer. In the present study researchers analyzed DNA and RNA from 14,287 colorectal cancer tumors, comparing tumors with higher levels of CD47 expression to those with lower levels. The researchers found that higher levels were linked to more aggressive tumors, more activated cancer pathways and more immune cells inside the tumor. The findings suggest that developing an immune checkpoint inhibitor drug that can block the activity of CD47 could improve outcomes for colon cancer patients, many of whom are not well served by existing immunotherapy drugs.

A published study involving University of Cincinnati experts has found significant sex differences in cardiovascular outcomes in patients with kidney failure who are on dialysis. Now the lead author is receiving an award for her work.

Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98 percent remains largely unknown.

One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do—if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as “junk.”

Now, a new study in Cell finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk—they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development. Using CRISPR technology that targets RNA instead of DNA, researchers at New York University and the New York Genome Center searched across the genome and found nearly 800 noncoding RNAs important for the function of diverse human cells from different tissues.