Scientists have uncovered dementia-like behavior in pancreas cells at risk of turning into cancer. The findings provide clues that could help in the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer, a difficult-to-treat disease linked to 6,900 deaths in the UK every year.

The research was published in the journal Developmental Cell in a paper titled “ER-phagy and proteostasis defects prime pancreatic epithelial state changes in KRAS-mediated oncogenesis.”

Researchers from the Cancer Research UK Scotland Center studied pancreas cells in mice over time, to see what was causing healthy cells to turn into cancer cells. They discovered that pancreatic cells at risk of becoming cancerous, known as pre-cancers, develop faults in the cell’s recycling process (known as “autophagy”).

Researchers from ShanghaiTech University, including Zhen-Ge Luo, used brain organoids derived from individuals with fAD to examine disease-related changes that occur during early brain development. The organoids, which are lab-grown models of human brain tissue, displayed several features associated with AD: elevated amyloid protein accumulation, a reduction in mature neurons, increased cell death and gene expression differences relative to healthy controls.

Role of thymosin β4 in brain pathology

Among the differentially expressed genes, the researchers identified TMSB4X, which encodes thymosin β4 (Tβ4), a protein with anti-inflammatory properties. TMSB4X expression was reduced in both the fAD organoids and in neurons from post-mortem samples of individuals with AD, suggesting a possible link between lower Tβ4 levels and disease pathology.

A new study, led by researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), identified tiny pieces of messenger RNA that are missing in pediatric high-grade glioma tumors but not in normal brain tissues. Preclinical research indicates that these missing RNA fragments can make difficult-to-treat tumors more responsive to immunotherapy. The findings were recently published in the journal Cell Reports.

One of the biggest challenges facing cancer research is the need to find safe and effective therapies for the most aggressive types of brain tumors. Adoptive immunotherapies with CAR-T cells are promising; however, they often also target healthy cells, which share most surface proteins with cancerous cells. While this collateral damage might be tolerable in patients with certain types of blood cancer, in the brain, wiping out healthy neurons is unacceptable. This means that deep knowledge of gene expression patterns exclusive to tumor cells is critical.

A potential means of discovering new therapeutic targets for brain tumors may lie in alternative splicing, a process whereby a single gene produces multiple proteins by rearranging exons, the building blocks of messenger RNA, in different combinations. Researchers suspected that splicing in glioma cells may differ from splicing in normal brain cells, which could help devise new therapeutic interventions.

Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid-led research reports that intermittent theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) paired with language therapy over six months was associated with positive outcomes in primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Improvements included less decline in regional brain metabolism and improvements in language abilities, functional independence, and neuropsychiatric symptoms.

Primary progressive aphasia is a neurodegenerative clinical syndrome with insidious onset characterized by prominent speech and/or language impairment. It is a syndrome that can be the mode in which common causes of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal degeneration are initially present.

According to current international consensus criteria, three variants are recognized: nonfluent/agrammatic, semantic, and logopenic. Speech-language intervention has proven to be beneficial.

When you see something—a tree in your backyard, say, or the toy your toddler hands you—that visual information travels from your retinas to your brain. And like a train stopping at stations along its route, the information pauses at particular regions of the brain where it’s processed and sent along to its next location.

A region called the visual thalamus has been thought to be primarily a relay, simply directing visual information to its next area. But a new study published in Neuron finds that the thalamus actually integrates additional information from other brain regions and reshapes the information it sends along to the brain cortex.

Liang Liang, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and senior author of the study, suspected the thalamus might be doing more than it had been given credit for.

A fading sense of smell can be one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease even before cognitive impairments manifest. Research by scientists at DZNE and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) sheds new light on this phenomenon, pointing to a significant role for the brain’s immune response, which seems to fatally attack neuronal fibers crucial for the perception of odors.

The study, published in Nature Communications, is based on observations in mice and humans, including analysis of brain tissue and so-called PET scanning. These findings may help to devise ways for early diagnosis and, consequently, early treatment.

The researchers came to the conclusion that these olfactory dysfunctions arise because immune cells of the brain called “microglia” remove connections between two brain regions, namely the olfactory bulb and the locus coeruleus.