Research Update

Researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine have discovered a possible new approach in treating solid tumors through the creation of a novel nanoparticle. Solid tumors are found in cancers such as breast, head and neck, and colon cancer.

Xin Ming, PhD, associate professor of cancer biology at the School of Medicine, and his team used a nanoparticle to deliver a small molecule called ARL67156 to promote an anti-tumor immune response in mouse models of colon, head and neck, and metastatic breast cancer, resulting in increased survival. The study was published online in June in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment, but unfortunately, only about 20% of patients respond to treatment. Ming noted that most solid tumors have a poor microenvironment that can make them unresponsive to conventional cancer therapeutics, including immunotherapy.

“Our study suggests there’s potential translation of our nanoparticle therapeutic for treating human cancers and that it might also boost the effectiveness of existing treatments,” Ming said. “These findings warrant further evaluation.”

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Scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have shown that two specific networks in the brain can strongly influence how successful a person will be when trying to lose weight.

These findings, published in the April edition of the journal Obesity, may ultimately help in developing tailored behavior-based treatments that target specific brain circuitry to aid in weight loss, according to the study’s principal investigator Jonathan Burdette, MD, House Staff ’98, professor of radiology at the School of Medicine.

The goal of this study was to determine whether the degree of weight loss after six months of a behavior-based intervention was related to connectivity within two functional networks (FNs), FN1 and FN2, in a group of older adults with obesity. Functional brain networks are areas of the brain that are working together in sync. FN1 and FN2 were first identified by Burdette and his team in 2018 as being involved in successful weight loss.

“These findings show that the brain network properties of people who were less successful at weight loss were different from folks who were more successful,” Burdette said. “Some people have a stronger unconscious sensory motor bias to pursue food, while others appear to have less.

In a society of food abundance with food cues everywhere, this information can help explain why some people have such difficulty in taking off excess weight and maintaining it.”

This is the first study to link key concepts that have been identified as important in understanding obesity and overeating to success with behavioral weight loss among older adults with obesity.

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The use of continuous temperature monitoring in staff and older residents of independent- and assisted-living facilities may be an effective intervention for early detection and containment of infectious disease outbreaks and provide better outcomes for people in those facilities, according to a study conducted by scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

“As we saw during the early days of the COVID pandemic, nursing homes and other congregate living facilities were often hotspots of infection due to the residents’ advanced age, chronic medical conditions and frailty, as well as inherent infection risks associated with congregate living,” said the study’s lead author, Eric Kirkendall, MD, MBI, deputy director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

“Also, fever in older adults can be more difficult to detect due to increased variations in their baseline temperatures than in younger people, so our team thought that continuous monitoring might be a way to detect individual or widespread outbreaks earlier.”

The researchers found that a wearable device that continuously monitored temperature in an older adult population and the staff in congregate living facilities was feasible and acceptable. This approach identified fever undetected by current standard of care indicating the potential capability of this device for earlier detection of fevers.

A significant and unexpected finding was the device identified fevers in four participants that usual care did not. This is a key finding that demonstrates the value of continuous monitoring, especially in this high-risk population, Kirkendall said.

The study findings were published online in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

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